Online search is often the starting point for local consumers to find nearby products and services.
In fact, 78% use the Internet to search for information about local businesses in their area at least once a week, and 21% search locally. every dayaccording to BrightLocal’s latest local consumer survey.
If you want it to be found, it must appear in local organic and map pack search results. Then you have the opportunity to convert those searchers into in-store traffic, booked reservations, or other types of paying customers.
In this column, I’ll show you seven of the most impactful ways you can use SEO to build local visibility.
1. Check for technical errors that may affect indexing
This is baseline SEO. If search engines can’t index your site, they won’t find you.
First, learn the basics of how search engines crawl and index your website. This basic knowledge will help guide her SEO efforts going forward.
You may decide that technical SEO issues such as indexing are too complex to manage in running your business.
If so, you can at least figure out what to hire an SEO agency or consultant to do.
On the other hand, if you feel confident in looking up indexing issues yourself, the following resources can help.
2. Create great content
Content is how you deliver all your messages, offers and calls to action to your audience.
But your small business isn’t just competing with other businesses like you in search results.
We also face media publications, informational websites, big brands, local review sites, and all sorts of other sources that create content related to their products and services.
The bar is high, which means your content has to be special to stand out.
Before you start blogging in earnest, take the time to craft a local content strategy that aligns with your business goals.
Include different types of local content and optimize each piece for search using these proven on-page local SEO best practices.
3. Incorporate local link building into your SEO strategy
Links are the currency of the web. These are important trust signals for search engines like Google, suggesting that other users endorse your content.
As John McAlpin explains:
Part of our Local SEO Guide, his article What Are Local Links and How to Find More Local Link Opportunities is a great starting point for your local link building strategy.
From there, I highly recommend reading this column by Kevin Rowe. This column presents 50 types of links and what you need to do to attract them.
4. Organize your Google Business Profile
No local search strategy is complete without a well-optimized Google Business Profile (GBP).
While we collect local business information from various sites, directories and networks across the web, we refer to our own profiles as the only authoritative source of information about local businesses.
Formerly known as the Google My Business program, these profiles have become richer and more interactive in recent years. These updates also make it more useful for local searchers.
GBP now not only provides important business information such as location and contact information, but also allows you to:
- Use a variety of high-quality photos and videos to help searchers understand the experience your business will have.
- Feature special offers, events, and more in Google Posts.
- Interact with your customers through messages, Q&A, and replying to reviews.
- Actively share differentiating features, health and safety information, payment methods, etc. with attributes.
Sherry Bonelli provides an excellent guide to GBP optimization here.
5. Make sure your local listings are accurate
Google cares about the search experience above all else. Therefore, inaccurate and outdated information that negatively impacts the experience of searchers is a liability and can seriously damage your local visibility.
Wherever searchers come across your business listing online, including social, local directories, yellow pages, and review sites like Yelp and Trip Advisor, ensure that the information they find there is seamlessly translatable. is needed.
For example, an incorrect phone number, address, hours of operation, or other important business information could lead searchers to a closed store.
Or sent by the GPS system to your previous location.
When different versions of important business data appear on the web, it becomes difficult for search engines to determine what is true.
Given that Google wants to provide each searcher with the best possible answer to their query, we don’t want our algorithms to question whether the business information is trustworthy.
Manually tracking your listings can be time consuming and extremely difficult, as data aggregators and directories may be scanning for business information and updating your listings.
In this way, erroneous information and outdated listings can proliferate, spreading incorrect addresses, URLs, or opening hours over a wide area.
Small businesses can use local SEO tools like Moz Local and Semrush to automate the process of scanning business listings and monitoring their accuracy.
6. Monitor and respond to local reviews
Reviews are a highly influential part of the local search experience, with 77% of local consumers saying they will always or regularly read reviews when searching for local businesses by 2021. I’m here.
Google’s local ranking algorithm is less of a mystery than its organic ranking algorithm. Google professes that there are three main factors in local ranking: relevance, distance, and popularity.
Reviews are part of the visibility factor, Google says:
“Your number of reviews and your review score on Google affect your local search rankings. More reviews and positive ratings can improve your business’s local rankings.”
Jeff Riddall provides a comprehensive overview of how Google reviews affect organic and local search rankings.
For more information, see Matt Southern’s Where and How to Get the Right Reviews for Your Business.
7. Use relevant local schemas
in the meantime not a ranking factorschema markup is a type of structured data that facilitates the work of web crawlers and helps search engines better understand the content of a page.
Anything Google can do to better match your page with related queries wins.
Schema markup helps trigger rich results that highlight additional information such as breadcrumbs, reviews, FAQs, and sitelinks in search results.
It is imperative to properly apply your schema and test and validate your markup, as errors can prevent you from getting rich results.
Chelsea Alves wrote a great guide on local markup and rich results that serves as a starting point for adding this tactic to your local SEO strategy.
put it all together
Working on local SEO as a small business can seem daunting. There may not even be a dedicated marketing department, and it is not uncommon for business owners to be overwhelmed with the administrative and marketing tasks of an entrepreneur.
We hope this guide gives you enough information and resources to decide what you can work on in-house and what you need to outsource.
Using agencies and consultants to shore up your in-house skills is fine, but it’s essential to fully understand what you’re asking these professionals to do.
Remember, local SEO is not a one-off “set it and forget it” activity, it’s a tick off a list.
This is an integral part of marketing and is often associated with customer service as well.
For more information, download the Search Engine Journal ebook, Local SEO: The Definitive Guide to Improvement Your Local Search Rankings.
Other resources:
Featured Image: Shutterstock/Deemka Studio
