Local search is a solid tool for local businesses. Around 80 percent of the customers use search engines to search for local information. Thus, local SEO is important if you want your business to remain on top. To assist you in this process, we have created a definitive search engine optimization guide that will help you in optimizing your business for local SEO.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is all about optimizing your business website in such a way that it can be easily found in local searches. It is the process of enhancing your website to help it rank better for a local target audience. Having a business website is important as it gives you the opportunity to target the whole digital space. However, if your target audience is located around your business, then it is a great idea to practice local SEO.

Why is Local SEO Important?

If you have a small business, or if you mainly provide local services, then local SEO can help you in getting more customers and enhancing the business locally. According to a Forbes study, around 95 percent of mobile users use their devices to do local searches. Out of these 61 percent called up the business and 59 percent actually visited the business. Most of the mobile users call a business directly from Google by clicking on the search results.

Thus, it is clear from these numbers that local searches are a major source of potential customers. Since these qualified leads are for a specific product or service, one can expect a high rate of conversion as well.

Local SEO Keyword Research

Research about local keywords plays an integral role in finding out how your competitors are targeting and attracting traffic to their website and also to find out which terms can bring in the maximum traffic to your website. One can make use of Keyword Planner to check which keywords give the maximum search volume in your area. Additionally, if you want to find out which keywords your competitors are using, you can simply put their website URL in the Keyword Planner Tool of Google and find out the same.

Local SEO Ranking Factors

There are a number of factors that affect the local SEO ranking of your business website. Some of the major factors are as follows:

• Link Signals: These can be in the form of inbound anchor text, linking domain quantity and linking domain authority.

• On-Page Signals: SEO ranking can also be affected by the presence of keywords in titles, NAP and domain authority

• Behavioral Signals: A website’s click-through-rate, check-ins, and mobile clicks also impact its ranking on Google

• Social Signals: It refers to how much a website engages with the customers on social platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Google My Business

Google My Business (GMB) provides you with a free and lightweight analytics package. This package gives a basic view of how the existing and potential customers view and interact with your business listing. Furthermore, Insights highlight the number of times a listing appears in plain search as well as Google Maps. It also shows how many clicks have been received by your website along with the number of requests for phone calls and driving directions. GMB also gives a breakdown of the number of customers that check out your listing through direct searches as well as directory searches.

On-Site SEO for Local Business

On-site optimization of the website is important for ranking on the keywords that the target audience is looking for. Following are some tips for optimizing the website:

• Structure of the Website to Rank Landing Pages: In case you serve multiple cities, you can create landing pages that are specific to a certain city.

• Optimize the Different areas of the Website: It is a good idea to optimize the Title tags, headers, meta description and the content with the relevant keywords.

• Include Specific Call-to-Actions: To drive high traffic and ensure conversions, include specific CTAs where the customers can proceed and contact you for further process.

• Add Reviews and Testimonials: Including reviews on your website would help in higher conversions and boost customer’s trust in your services.

• Ensure that your Website is Mobile-Friendly: With the increasing number of mobile users, Google largely focuses on websites that are mobile-friendly. You can use Google’s Mobility Tool to check the same for your website.

Local Citations

After optimizing your Google My Business page, it is time to get NAP (name, address, phone number citations. Inconsistency in NAP can result in ranking issues. You can conduct an audit to find out if your NAP citations are consistent or not. Having scattered or outdated NAP can make it hard for the customers to find you and degrade your local search ranking.

Conclusion

This local SEO guide is designed to give you success in local searches. It would help you in gaining better online visibility while ranking you higher on search engines.