If you’re a small business, optimizing local SEO is essential for your website success. Unlike the national SEO rankings, local SEO prioritizes appearing on SERPs based on your location and the location of your target customers. When you optimize local SEO on your website, you drive more traffic to your site, which can lead to more customer leads, sales, and conversions.
In order to build your brand reputation and increase your internet influence, you should understand the basics of optimal SEO. By shifting your focus and marketing efforts to a more local approach, you stand out from the national searches and have an advantage over bigger brands. Without this local SEO approach, it’s possible your business is missing out on significant traffic and business. So, here are six tips for making your local SEO success.
6 Ways to Optimize Local SEO
1. Use Your Google Business Page
The Google My Business page is a free way to get noticed by the algorithm. You can establish your presence and show up in Google Maps any time someone looks for a business like yours. You’re also more likely to be authenticated by Google, which means your business will show up in the valuable sidebar space of the search results. Make sure you verify your locations, provide up-to-date information, company logo, hours of operations, acceptable payment methods, and products you sell or services you provide. You can further optimize local SEO by asking customers to leave reviews and then respond sincerely to those reviews.
2. Optimize Your Site for Mobile
Nearly everyone you know has a smartphone, which means they’re more likely to search for your services or products on their phones. To make your site more visible and rank higher in SERPs, optimize your site for mobile usage. According to a Stone Temple study in 2018, mobile site visits increased from 57% in 2016 to 63% in 2017. Some of the ways you can compete for attention are to ensure that your site loads quickly, use bigger fonts that are easy to read, use images and crop sparingly, and ensure intuitive UI for great UX.
3. Use Metadata
In order for search engines to know where you’re located and to best optimize local SEO, you have to provide this information on your site. One of the ways businesses can do this is by taking advantage of metadata and tags. These short descriptions and catchy titles will leave a huge impression on your audience when they search for services. While page titles still trump meta descriptions, both should contain relevant information about your location. Always include the service you’re offering and your city and state in the page title tags to tell the search engine where your customers can find you.
4. Create Web Pages Services, Locations, and Products
A condensed website is not helpful for local SEO and can have a negative impact on your business website traffic. Instead, create a page for all of your different services, locations, and products. Not only is this an SEO best practice rule, it’s also helpful for your customers and helps create a clearer site map. This is especially important if you have multiple locations. Create a page for each of these locations so that SEO results know you offer those products or services in that area. This may take a bit more work, but it will be well worth it in the end.
5. Set Up Social Media Pages
Social media business pages are also important for a variety of marketing purposes, but they’re also beneficial when it comes to optimizing local SEO. When you set up your Facebook or Instagram business page, you can have signals pointing to your location. This tells search engines that you are present and active across all platforms. Producing quality content on these pages and then encouraging visitors to click on the link to your web pages will increase foot traffic, giving credit to your site, and improving your SEO rankings.
6. Use Local Keywords
If you’re looking to rank higher in local SERPs, hone in on local keywords that are relevant to your customers and target market. Then use these words throughout your website in ways that make sense. With the help of Google’s Keyword Planner, you can filter through keywords based on locations. Using this tool gives you a good idea of what kind of words or phrases your potential customers are using and what’s most popular in your area. Page titles and meta descriptions are a great place to use these keywords as well.
Your SEO Questions Answered
Optimizing local SEO is an important marketing strategy, and we understand doing this correctly can make all the difference for local businesses. At Charley Grey, SEO is just one of our areas of expertise. We also help businesses like yours design and manage attractive and engaging websites that convert potential customers into paying customers. To find out what our team can do for your website, contact us for more information.