12 Essential Tips For A Successful Local SEO Strategy
Here are our 12 essential tips for creating a successful local SEO Strategy.
- Make Your Website Crawlable and Indexable
- Create Location Based Landing Pages
- Optimize Google My Business Profile
- Use Local Business Structured Data
- Build Local Links
- Submit Listings to Citation Websites
- Optimise for Local Keywords
- Include Google Maps
- Get Reviews
- Optimize For Mobile
- Improve Page Loading Speed
- Keep Content Local
Make Your Website Crawlable and Indexable
This it the fundamental point. Your website needs to be found in the search engine results. Ensuring that your website is easily crawlable and indexable by all search engines is the foundation of SEO and without that being in place your website will not be generating the leads or sales that you want.
Making your website crawlable and indexable involves making sure that your website is well structured with a clear hierarchy. It needs have an XML sitemap and you need to ensure that important content is not blocked by robots.txt files or noindex tags. If your website is crawlable and indexable it allows search engines to effectively understand and list all of your website pages in the search engine results.
Create Location Based Landing Pages
If your business operates in multiple locations, creating individual landing pages for each location can be beneficial. These landing pages should contain specific information about each location and localized content. This helps in ranking for location-specific searches and provides a better user experience for local customers.
Best practice is to make these pages unique for each location and provide specific information related to the location.
Optimize Google My Business Profile
This is crucial for local SEO. You need to have a well optimized Google My Business (GMB) Profile. This includes completing your profile with accurate and up to date information such as business name, address, phone number and hours of business.
Requesting reviews from customers and regularly updating the profile with posts, photos, and responding to comments and reviews can also enhance your visibility in local search results.
Use Local Business Structured Data
Implementing structured data (Schema mark-up) for your local business. The essential elements to include are the type of business, address, phone number hours of business etc. This helps search engines understand the specifics of your business and can improve visibility in search engine results especially with rich snippets and local search features which will make your listing stand out in the search engine results.
Build Local Links
Local backlinks are a sign to search engines that your website is relevant an authoritative for the local area so building links from local sources like news sites, community websites, and local bloggers can help improve your local SEO. Another avenue to look into is participating in local events which can be a good strategy for earning these types of links.
Submit Listings to Citation Websites
We use various tools to help find opportunities and analyse top local competitors citation and their total count which gives us a target number to beat. It’s a time consuming process and can be part of an ongoing SEO strategy to build over time.
Optimise for Local Keywords
Use keywords on your website that re relevant to your local area. City, region, local landmarks etc. This helps the search engines list your for searches that are specific to your locale. Care needs to be taken though not to fall foul of Google Penalties for over optimisation which can result in a drastic fall in search engine results position or even being completely dropped for the index.
Keywords should always be included naturally and in context and not too many of the same keyword. Always create content for users not to hit a specific keyword density. With that said it is good to not over optimise and a check to make sure that no more than around 2 mentions of the same keyword per 100 words.
Include Google Maps
This also reinforces local relevance and is a signal to search engines that you operate in the area so including a Google Maps widget on your website is good for local SEO and a useful feature for your customers.
Get Reviews
Gaining reviews on your Google My Business Page can significantly improve your local SEO. Not only that positive reviews acn improve your businesses visibility, enhance search engine results position and influence potential customers. Responding to reviews both positive and negative shows that you value customer feedback and are happy to engage with clients.
Optimize For Mobile
It is essential for your website to work well on mobile. It need to be mobile friendly. This means having a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes, ensuring that the content and images are optimised for the slower mobile data connection and that navigation is easy to use on touchscreens.
Google now uses mobile-first indexing which means that the mobile version of your website is used for indexing and ranking.
Improve Page Loading Speed
Page loading speed is apparently a significant factor in ranking. From a users point of view a slow loading website is a major issue. If pages take too long to load they will be off to another site for a faster and more responsive experience. We use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to analyse and improve a websites loading speed.
Techniques for improving page speed include optimising images, minimising the use of large files and scripts, minimising external scripts that pull in code from external sources. These are all elements that can slow down page loading times. Google PageSpeed Insights is a great tool for identifying the bottlenecks that need working on.
Keep Content Local
In addition to using local keywords you can customise your websites content to include local events, local news and other local references. This again helps create a connection with the local audience as well as giving signals to the search engines that your a local resource that should be appearing in local queries.
Content should also include local terms in meta data, that’s your title, and description on the page that search engines use for displaying in the search engine results.
Get an SEO Partner
We can help with your SEO strategy and work to help improve your visibility in the search engines. For more information see our on our SEO packages or contact us for more information