How many people do you want to reach? That is the question that every business owner needs to ask themselves when deciding what to do with their website. If the answer is “a lot,” you need to focus on local SEO strategies.
Local search queries have skyrocketed since Google Maps, and other mapping services became popular, and now half of all searches have a local intent! This means if your website isn’t showing up in those results, it’s only a matter of time before another one does. In this article, we’ll go over how to optimize your site for local search visibility so you can rank higher and drive more traffic from this huge market, especially on mobile search.
Localsearch is the most popular search engine. It ranks locally relevant content based on location signals such as geolocation information, IP address data, and more! As a result, your website must claim its geographic relevance to rank higher among this huge market of users looking for nearby businesses. Without these identifiers or local-based keywords, it would be difficult to rank for local search queries, especially those that are more specific.
If you want your website to show up in these searches, it’s important to make sure these items are present on the site. This means statements like “we’re located at” or “our office is near,” including city and state if applicable, as well as the tips that we will be outlining below. These tips are the same that we implement on our client’s websites through our local SEO services, and they are getting awesome results.
Here are the links to the tips in case you want to jump ahead.
Let’s get started.
Find Local Keywords
This is the first step in ranking your website higher for local searches. It’s important to ‘think small and think close.’ For example, if you own a chiropractor office specializing in back pain, it’s best not to list keywords like “chiropractic care” as they are too broad and will have less impact on Google’s ranking factors. It’s much better to focus on a specific location, such as “Pittsburgh chiropractor” or “Chiropractic care in Chicago.”
With a simple addition of your location to your keywords, you can get incredible search engine optimization (SEO) results. For example, If your page title is Precise Roofing, you can change it to Miami Precise Roofing and sprinkle the location throughout the page: how to get a free roof estimate in Miami, how often should you replace the roof of your Miami home, how much does a new roof cost in Miami, Fl., etc. Then it would be easy for someone in proximity to find what they are looking for because there is now an added keyword that will return your website within their relevant search radius.
You know the importance of keywords for your online marketing strategy. And if you are a lawyer in Denver, taking advantage of location-specific search queries is important to help boost conversions and make sure that potential clients find your website.
Writerzen provides a keyword explorer that helps marketers find local seed words to discover other related key phrases around their business: legal advice attorneys near me; bankruptcy lawyers Denver CO – these are just two examples out many possible choices available on this tool!
Create Location Pages
If you have two or more locations, consider creating additional location pages. It might be different neighborhoods, cities, states, and even countries! Say you are based in Los Angeles but also operate out of San Diego. In this case, it makes sense to create separate location pages like these:
- https://yoursite.com/los-angeles/
- https://yoursite.com/san-diego/
Or let’s say you have your own plumbing service in Katy, Texas, and serve the city of Houston. Or you might be a real estate agent who has listings throughout Manhattan or is willing to travel elsewhere in NYC to serve more prospects. These are good cases where it makes sense to create specific pages targeting those individual locations to take advantage of local searches.
Add Local Schema To Your Website
To rank your website locally, you also need to add a few bits of code in the head section of all pages. This is called Schema markup and consists of adding metadata tags that provide information about what’s on the page (or site), like the date published or author name. More specifically, the local schema will help Google know who publishes or owns the business and where it’s located, improving your chances of appearing in the local rich snippets.
Local Business structured data is one of the many structured data types and can tag your business information. This will allow Google to know that your business relates only to a specific location, making it more relevant for search queries related to that area. The easiest way to apply Local Business markup would be using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, which allows users to submit their URLs and choose what type of schema they want to apply to their website or blog, such as the LocalBusiness Schema.
Schema is a great way to optimize your website for search engines. You can do this in many ways, but one of the easiest methods involves using plugins like Schema Pro on WordPress sites. There may be different solutions for other types of websites depending on their type of CMS; contact your digital marketing agency if needed!
Build Business Citations
Citations are references to your business name, address, and phone number (NAP). The more often these details appear on other websites, the more confident Google is about your business which is an important ranking factor. As a result, it will rank you higher in its local search results for relevant queries!
To create citations, I recommend using a service like SEO Builder or Bright Local. These tools will make it easy for you to find and claim your listing details on directories that matter, generating more clicks! You also want to make sure that your website is listed on the top aggregators like Foursquare, Neustar Localeze, and Data Axle.
Set Up Your GMB Listing
Claiming your Google My Business listing is the first step to dominating local SEO. Not only will you be eligible for showing up when people search on map pack listings, but if someone searches with a physical location in mind, they’ll also find what’s close and available from your business!
The first step to claiming your listing is logging into Google My Business and verifying your address. Once that’s done, you’ll need to add more information about the kind of service or product you offer, set up photos for the listings page (you can upload images from multiple sources), and fill out a description of what makes your special compared to the competition.
You can also list what your business offers that’s unique, and make sure to include links where you mention the service or product on a website of yours so it’ll show up in the search queries. If you have an online store through Google Shopping, then be sure to link in products from there too!
You should also set up your free GMB website, which will allow you to add more information about your business and other content such as blog posts that Google can index. Every photo you upload, an event that you post, or change in hours will be automatically added to your free website. Make sure to link it to your main site to help users find your business.
Manage Your Online Reputation
Now that you set up your GMB listing and have your website listed on online directories, it’s time to monitor your brand’s online reputation.
So what should you do? Monitor your ranking and take note of negative reviews or comments that could harm your business. Engage with customers on social media – don’t just ignore them! It is important to respond quickly when someone has a question, complaint, or suggestion for improvement, so they know that their opinion matters to your business. This can help turn a potential customer into a paying one.
Different platforms will allow you to monitor all of your social media channels, such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social. But to truly monitor all of your online presence, we suggest signing up with an online reputation service that will monitor not only your social media channels but also your business citations and GMB. You will be notified when someone mentions your name or someone writes a review.
Build Backlinks
It’s important to build a presence in your local community, and one of the best ways to do that is by getting backlinks from sources within your area.
It’s important to build backlinks to your website from high-quality websites. Be careful not to build spammy links, resulting in a penalty or loss of organic search ranking!
Your goal is to get inbound links that are relevant and helpful so Google will index them. This can be done by creating unique and valuable content that others want to share and link back to.
Once you write your quality content, then you can reach out to bloggers and relevant websites and share what you have written, and see if they find it valuable to their users. An easy way to find these high-quality websites is using an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. Just search for your competitors and take a look at all of their backlinks. You’re looking for sites that might want to link to your valuable content as well.
Final Thoughts On How To Rank Your Website On Local Search
In this article, we wanted to give you some of the most important things that you can start doing today to be found by local customers online. Of course, there’s all technical SEO stuff like optimizing your meta description, H1s, H2s, etc., along with many other ranking factors.
One of the most important aspects of a good SEO strategy is understanding how to get your website ranked locally, even if you serve an entire state or country. We’ve provided 7 tips that you can use as a starting point for ranking your site higher in Google and other search engines by targeting specific keywords, creating citations, and more!
If you want help implementing these strategies, contact us today! Our team of experts is ready and waiting to partner with you to create a stellar SEO or marketing plan that drives sales by considering how your customers think. Which of these cognitive neuroscience principles have you applied to increase your product sales online?
