Did you know that 61% of users don’t bother with your company’s website if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds or less? Local businesses need to pick up their SEO game if they don’t want to lose potential customers. There is a lot more to local SEO than just throwing a few keywords in the title tag.
One of the most important aspects of your local business is your website. Your homepage and other pages on your site should all have top-notch SEO. This article will help you improve your website SEO for local ranking.
Optimizing a website for local search is an excellent way to get the most out of your SEO efforts and can be very beneficial to your local business. It can increase your traffic, improve your SERPs rank, and help you achieve more conversions, which means more customers.
Local search engine optimization or local SEO services are the way to rank better in the Google, Yahoo, and Bing search engines for specific keywords and phrases made by people in your area. Here are some simple steps to follow to optimize your website for local SEO.
Optimize Your Website
To optimize your site for local SEO, you need to focus on specific aspects like your keyword’s use, meta tags, page content, and many other things. If you can master these basics for your site, you will have a great start on your journey to optimize your local SEO website. Below are some points that you need to consider:
Use Relevant Keywords In Your Copy
When you optimize a website for local SEM, you need to make sure that you focus on your keywords because people who are looking for a particular product or service will type the right keywords into the search engine.
If you don’t, you won’t get the desired results, and most of your traffic will move on to your competitor’s. You should also target your local market because this way, you will capture their visitors’ attention, and you will have an easier time converting them into customers.
Optimize Your Meta Tags
Meta Tags are essential parts of a web page that serve as clues to search engines about the page’s contents. The main point of a Meta Tag is to indicate the keywords that the site is about and its location.
If your site isn’t located in your local area, you will have difficulty getting your site ranked in search engines. Ensure that you target local business and specify the state or city you are in so that you will be able to improve your local SEO efforts.
Use Local Business Schema
Schema Local Business markup is a newly approved markup for local businesses, aiming to improve its ranking in Google. Marking up your local business information can be done using the JSON-LD format, which is a good explanation in itself.
However, you can do a few other things to improve your ranking and help Google understand your business better. Schema Local Business markup is an amazing way to share your business information with your customers. It’s important to keep up to date with the latest SEO trends, as it’s not the same as it was five years ago.
Create Quality Content
Local optimization is not just about linking to websites. It is also about having a blog, having a profile in different forums and social media groups, and submitting your site to all the major search engines out there.
Please don’t underestimate the power of this because of the potential link juice it will bring you. If you stick with having an account in a couple of different places, you will start to see results very quickly.
Make Sure That Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly
All of us know that mobile traffic has overtaken desktop traffic, increasing with every passing day. So, if you’re planning on ranking on local search results, you need to make sure that it’s mobile-friendly. A mobile-friendly website is a website that is easy to read and navigate on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet.
Your website will become a better source of traffic if it is mobile friendly. Always use a mobile responsive theme. A responsive theme means that your website will adjust its layout according to the device used to access it.
Ensure That Your Site Loads Quickly
It is well known that having a website that loads quickly is important for a variety of reasons. Not only can it improve your ranking with Search Engines by making your site appear more professional, but it can also improve the conversion rate of your site by populating your pages faster, and it can reduce your bounce rate and the time it takes a user to make a purchase.
If you’re striving to create a website that loads in under one second, you’ll want to ensure that your site’s code isn’t causing unnecessary delays. For example, while a few images on a page may improve the site’s look, they may also slow it down. (An easy way to test your website’s speed is by getting a website speed audit – it can tell you how fast your site loads and give some tips to help speed it up, like replacing images with CSS, removing unnecessary plugins, and compressing images.)
Add Your NAP Data To Your Website
To improve your local SEO and maximize your online visibility, you must add your business’s NAP data to your website. This stands for “Name, Address and Phone Number” and is the information that will show up when you do a local search on Google or other search engines.
It’s also important to have this information available on your social media profiles and in your email signature. Including NAP data on your website is easy to do. All you need is to make sure your address, phone number, and business name are added to your website’s “Contact” page. There are several ways you can do this, depending on the type of website you have.
Optimize Your Off-Site SEO
A well-optimized website helps you get more traffic to your website. But once you have the traffic, what do you do with the increased number of visitors? You need to optimize your website to convert the traffic you get to actual sales.
Instead of having all your traffic drive to your homepage, you want to control each visitor that comes to your site. All the traffic should be directed to pages that sell your product. This is called off-site SEO. It is an important aspect of SEO because it allows you to capture the audience you can bring to your website.
Improve Your Google My Business Profile
Your Google My Business page is one of the most important ways you can make sure you’re showing up where your customers are searching for you.
Optimizing your My Business Page is an important part of building a successful online business. You may already have a My Business Page, but it may not be optimized properly. To drive targeted traffic to your site and convert that traffic into leads, you need to optimize your My Business Page. The following are the steps on how to optimize your Google My Business Page.
Add Your Keywords
The first thing you should do is to check out the Google Product Search. Once you are on the search page, type in your business name and search for the keywords related to your business. Also, you should check out the search volume for your selected keywords. If there is a lot of search volume for your selected keywords, you are on the right track.
The next step you should take is to analyze your selected keywords. Check out the Google Keyword Tool to see the competition level for each of your selected keywords. If you find that your page ranks for one percent of all the keywords, you should increase your keyword bidding. The higher you bid, the more targeted traffic you will attract.
As you fill out your content, use both primary and LSI keywords wherever you can, as this counts for almost 20 percent of your chance of getting into the Local Pack according to Moz.
Fill Out Your Profile Completely
The last step in optimizing your Google My Business Profile is to analyze the text on your business profile. Make sure that the text and the links do not have duplicate content. If you have a page with many images, you can insert images linked from your homepage. The links on the images will provide valuable backlinks to help you achieve targeted traffic to your website.
It is time to ensure that it is fully completed and optimized once you have claimed your listing to get the best results. The last step (and this will be continuous) is to check your company’s listing frequently to ensure that all data is accurate and up-to-date. Google allows anyone to suggest changes and make adjustments to your listing, so ensuring that your business information is always 100% accurate is of the utmost importance.
Use Social Media Marketing
A good way to get people to really link with you on Facebook and Twitter is by using social media marketing. Go to each of your social accounts and set up a fan page. Encourage people to like your page and follow you. Make sure that you actually post anything on your pages, or you will end up wasting your time. This is especially important for getting inbound links, which is necessary for local SEO.
Build Backlinks
The first thing you need to do is to build more quality links to your website. There are several ways to accomplish this, such as getting other websites with similar content to link back to you, which will improve your page ranking on Google. It is also a good idea to submit your website to the directory listing such as DMOZ. There are some search engines, such as Google, that require website submission to rank well.
Create Citations
The second thing you should consider doing is submitting your site to the various directories. There are quite many free directory listings available, including Yahoo, DMOZ, and others. Submit your site to all of them, but be sure to submit it to the most popular ones. You should also make sure that you submit your site to article directories as well, although not to every article directory that may exist.
Directory submission is only part of the answer, however. It would help if you learned about submission to local directories as well. One of the best ways to do this is to submit your site to a business directory. Not only will this bring you more traffic, but it also will allow you to show that your business is available in your local area.
Business directory submissions are not the only option, though. You can also submit your site to national directories and international directories. Keep in mind that you want to create backlinks from local sources because they are most likely to click on your links than those coming from foreign sources.
Local Engagement
Engage with local customers. Most Internet marketers neglect their local audience. Instead, they tend to send spam emails to everyone around the world. This is a huge no-no for local businesses. It shows that you care nothing for your customers, which means you have little chance of turning them into loyal customers.
Final Thoughts On How To Improve Your Local SEO
The search engines are constantly changing, and they keep changing their algorithms as well. That means that even if a company’s site works perfectly right now, chances are they won’t stay on top of things in the future.
Small businesses need to stay on top of the game by constantly staying up-to-date with all the changes that happen to their algorithms. They also need to know which sites work in your area to create content for those sites in the future. If you would like help ranking your website on Google Maps, let our digital marketing agency power your local marketing today!
