If you own a local business (or are doing online marketing for it), you understand the challenges that come with these types of campaigns and campaigns for brands that are not localized.
Local SEO is many Unlike your average SEO campaign, local search results change faster than any other campaign.
Image Source: Moz
The chart above shows a breakdown of the weighting of various ranking factors within a local SEO campaign. One thing to note here is that there are some slightly different elements compared to his regular SEO campaigns (i.e. external location signal When My Business Signal), links, and on-page SEO factors still play a big role. The only difference is type The number of links you want to focus on varies greatly.
We’ll discuss some techniques you can implement to get results from your local SEO campaigns.
First Things First
Before you go ahead and start tracking links, your website needs a lot of pre-work to ensure you get the best possible results, especially if you want to rank within your local packlist. (see below). :
To rank within the above types of listings, rather than relying on the link building aspect, local NAP citations, local reviews, and my business signal.
Google My Business
If you haven’t already, you should Google My Business page.
There are many articles outlining this process, so I won’t go into all the details of the setup.
All you need to know is that once you’re set up, you’ll need to include:
- Add a long, well-formed, unique description, including a link.
- Choose the category that fits your business.
- Please upload as many photos as possible.
- Add local phone numbers to the list.
- Add company addresses that match your website or local directory.
- Upload a high resolution profile image and cover photo.
- Add business hours/days (if applicable).
- Get real reviews from customers (more on that later).
NAP (name, address, phone number)
Consistency is key here. You should ensure that the entire website (that is, every page) has full NAPs.Additionally, you should use just The same details/format you would use to mention your address on any other website (i.e. a local quote).
NAPs can also use Schema.org markup to give search engines everything they need to correctly display your company’s information.
Screenshot Source: Bespoke Music Tuition
The screenshot above shows a local London business placing a NAP in the footer of their website and marking it up with Schema.org data markup.
Here’s the code you can apply to your own website.
<div itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/LocalBusiness"> <p itemprop="name">COMPANY NAME</p> <p itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/PostalAddress"> <p itemprop="streetAddress">ADDRESS LINE 1</p> <p itemprop="addressLocality">CITY</p>, <p itemprop="addressRegion">REGION</p> <p itemprop="postalCode">POSTCODE/ZIP</p. <p itemprop="telephone">PHONE NUMBER</p> <meta itemprop="latitude" content="LATITUDE" /> <meta itemprop="longitude" content="LONGITUDE" /> </div>
Just change the bolded text to your own details — it’s easy.
For more information on NAP, see Jayson DeMers’ article.
local review
Local reviews have a direct impact on your local search rankings and should be obtained over time.
Note that this doesn’t just mean Google reviews. You can also focus on getting reviews on Yelp pages (used by Apple Maps) along with other local directories. However, the top priority is Google reviews.
First, you need to get in touch with your existing customer base and see if they’re interested in leaving a review, an achievement that’s easy to achieve. You can incentivize them for their time (such as discounts).
Another great tip from Greg Gifford’s recent talk at BrightonSEO was to create a page on your website that explains exactly how customers review your business (i.e. yourwebsite.com/review -us/). When it comes to contacting customers, especially non-techies, you won’t believe how effective this is!
For more in-depth strategies for getting reviews, check out these articles and this post on the Shopify Blog.
Local on-page SEO factors
On-page SEO for local businesses follows some pretty old-school SEO tactics. Local search listings place a lot of weight on the content on the page, so it’s important to get the most value out of it whenever possible.
Again, I won’t go into too much detail on this, as you’ll know when you read this, but I’ll break it down into a few key bullet points.
- Try adding your city/region and related keywords to your landing page title tag.
- Try adding your city/region and related keywords inside the H1 tag on your landing page.
- Try adding your city/region and related keywords in your landing page URL.
- Try adding your city/region and related keywords to your landing page content.
- Try adding your city/region and related keywords to the ALT attribute of your landing page images.
- Embed a Google Map with your business marker on your landing page.
Image Source: Aran Sweaters Direct
In addition to this, you should make sure your website is mobile friendly. This has become even more important with Google’s mobile search updates (more info here).
Image Source: eCO2 Greetings eCards
Local link building and citations
Link building within a local SEO campaign is extremely important and often overlooked.
Compared to standard SEO campaigns, local SEO relies heavily on links from other local websites that are truly relevant to your business. Rather than getting links from authoritative websites (which obviously helps), it’s more important to get links from websites close to you that say similar things to what you do. am.
This means that local directories are a useful resource when it comes to building links, especially when it comes to building links. Quote.
“A citation is an online reference to a business’ name, address, and phone number (NAP).” (source)
These citations don’t even need to be linked as long as they refer to the business NAP. consistently the same.
Tools like Bright Local can be used to check out existing citations and update them to keep everything consistent. You can also use this tool to track your competitors’ citations and add your own citations to the same website.
There are several ways to get local citations, here are some I use.
- Use a service like WhiteSpark to find and upload local citations.
- Go through the extensive list of citations on Moz’s website and submit the citations manually.
- Use tools like Ahrefs, Majestic and Open Site Explorer to perform competitive link research and find citations earned by your competitors.
- Set alerts via Mentions or Google Alerts to track new mentions of your competitors’ NAP lists.
Local link building strategy
There are many ways to earn/build links. If you need lots of links, check out my link building strategy guide. This article will focus on getting really effective links with local link building campaigns.
Here are some to get you started.
- Visit Meetup.com to find a listing of local events relevant to your industry. Find one that has a website and get in touch about sponsorship (most of the time you just need to prepare lunch for them). If they accept, you’ll see a link from their website (your local) and Meetup.com page (a very authoritative local link). Here is an example.
- Create local resources from public data (there are 30 different data sources here) and contact your local press to get coverage. This is exactly what he did with Krystian Szastok, with some surprising results (be sure to read this case study).
- Host your own local meetup or event and display the link from your local event page.
- Sign up for our press request service to get your work cited in local publications (high authority, great potential for local links).
- Run AMAs on Reddit (in industry-related subreddits) and within other local communities.
- Line up interviews and columns with relevant online publications.
- Offer discounts on your products/services to local organizations in exchange for a linked mention on the website.
- Enter your local awards (if none, start your own!).
- Dedicated to local PR outreach to get online and offline coverage with local news.
- Regularly conduct competitive link research and take advantage of new opportunities that your competitors have captured.
- Offer a scholarship (get a link from your local university) or offer a job to a student (you can get a link from the careers page).
That should be enough to get you started!
SERP click-through rate
Another ranking signal that is getting more and more talked about is CTR from SERPs.
It’s used as one of Google’s core, so it’s no wonder this is such a strong signal. quality score Measured within the AdWords platform. It makes sense to use this metric to measure the user experience that searchers are getting.
Moz’ Rand Fishkin conducted an interesting experiment with his Twitter followers to see how a large increase in SERP CTR affects search rankings. The results were huge—he saw he climbed several places in less than an hour!
I’ve run a few similar experiments over the past few months and have found some success in the short term, but to stabilize your rankings, you need a consistently high CTR. must keep. Also, search bounces are a negative signal for Google and should be reduced.
To maximize your SERP CTR, try the following:
- Make sure your Schema.org markup is set and includes reviews (if relevant).
- Make your title tag as readable and relevant as possible.
- Provide detailed meta descriptions that are relevant to what users are searching for.
- Split test titles using Twitter/Facebook/Google+/Reddit, measure CTR from social, and apply those findings to SERP snippets.
This is a very good resource to see your SERP CTR increase.
TL;DR
- your Google My Business Page settings.
- Optimize every landing page using local keyword data.
- Ensure that NAP lists are maintained consistently across the web.
- Generate genuine reviews from your customers on Google and Yelp.
- Optimize your snippets for search engines.
- Focus on localized link building.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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