If you own a website or a local business, you must get your local SEO done, and done well. There’s a lot of competition out there and businesses that get the attention of customers. One of the things you can do to ensure that your business is visible to potential customers is improving your local SEO.
Once you’ve deepened your local SEO reach, you can be sure that your business will attain more traffic and, ultimately, higher visibility. SERPs (Search engine results pages) are incredibly competitive. Google gives a lot of priority to paid ads on its search results. Thus, you have to put in twice the amount of work to ensure that you’re ranking organically.
Fortunately, not all hope is lost: with a little improvement here and there, you can improve your SEO campaign and attain significant results on your organic rankings in the process. Check out our tips on how to improve your local SEO.
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Intensify Your Link Building Campaign
An effective link building strategy is essential to exceptional local SEO. You cannot have an effective SEO campaign without the aspect of link building. Link-building is a time-consuming process, but if done well, and through authority sites, you’ll have a lot more traffic coming to your site.
Be sure to create relevant content frequently, and influencers will start to look in the direction of your site. Collaboration with such influencers will help you to build your brand and your reputation online. Investigate broken links on different websites and offer your site as the best option for backlinking.
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Do Competitor Research
What are your competitors doing that you aren’t? Why are they ranking higher than you are? Once you have the answers to this question, you’ll find ways to deal with them. Investigate the links your competitors have that you don’t. Once you’ve done this, ensure that these sites have domain authority and outreach.
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Consistency on NAPs
We can’t repeat this enough. One big reason why your local SEO isn’t doing great is inconsistency in NAPs. When your name, address, and phone aren’t the same on your Google My Business Profile or other online directories and web pages, Google sees your information as inaccurate and will pass over you to rank different websites.
Check your citation and ensure that your contact information is the same on them as it is on your website contact page. This is one of the ways through which you’ll be able to get organic traffic to your site.
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Up to Date Google My Business Profile
It is irrefutable that you need a Google My Business Profile to rank on local lists. However, having a Google My Business Profile isn’t an open and shut case. You have to claim your profile so no one can alter information, verify your account, add all essential categories, and link the profile to your website.
To optimize your profile, get your customers to review your services and products and update the information to match that on local directories.
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Manage Images and Videos
If you have videos on your site, optimize them more, and cue their metadata to be more click-worthy. Add keywords to your videos. If you transcribe the text on your videos, especially on sites like YouTube, it’ll help you to get indexed.
Compress your images and make your website suitable for mobile viewing by reducing the size or number of the images up on your site. When you compress an image, use a tool that won’t interfere with the quality’s integrity. Get ranking software that’ll help you check video and image ranking.
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Have a Data Markup
Google SERPs need you to have data markup to list you on their Knowledge Graph pages. Different platforms use different data markups. For example, a schema is best for Google, and social media sites use Open Graph. Different types of software can help you keep track of your markups.
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Get Reviews and Engage Your Customers
How do you prove to Google that your business exists? You get your customers to leave positive reviews about your business. This builds trust for your business, and it’ll help you get more visibility as potential customers see positive reviews.
Even though it’s not easy getting your customers to leave reviews on your profile, it is an activity that bears real fruit. Reward customers who leave reviews by offering link building opportunities to your website, it’s a win-win in both situations. Your customer gets free publicity, and you get more traffic to your site.
The easiest and most effective way of getting your customers to leave reviews is by emailing them with a link to your profile. All they have to do is click and type. Don’t be disappointed if even your most loyal customer doesn’t leave a link initially. It’s a process that takes time and patience.
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Research Keywords
There’s a lot of competition out there when it comes to keyword research and optimization. When you aren’t in the same location, it isn’t easy to rank for keywords. Keyword research will help you create content so that you can use the best possible keywords your customers will be searching for.
Create as much content as you can for low-competition keywords and add them to your anchor text or HTML tags.
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Beef Up Your Security
When you beef up security on your site, you’re less likely to suffer attacks from viruses, malicious content, or links that head nowhere. Websites that run on WordPress have access to excellent security tools. Your competition will most likely not remember to optimize their site security, and this is a sure-fire way to beat them.
Conclusion
Local SEO is changing and becoming more dynamic than we’ve seen in the past. A lot of emphasis is placed on using social media and customer reviews as social proof of business presence. The SEO strategies we’ve provided are simple but will go a long way toward improving search results, ranking, and general local SEO. Assure your customers with a well-represented image of an exceptionally managed business, and they’ll even send referrals to you.
