The Best Practices to Optimize Your Website for Local SEO

With local searches becoming more and more popular, you should not fall behind in improving your local SEO.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to increase search engine visibility with local users.

You might be getting curious to know why local SEO is important. However, your curiosity will get quenched if you know that more than 45 per cent of all Google searches are for local businesses nowadays.

If your business has a local customer base, you should not miss out on local SEO, which can help your business stand out from the rest. It can help drive more traffic to your website. As such, you can get more leads for conversion.

Usually, the leads will be from consumers who search for products or services your business offers, so you will likely get more conversions to boost your revenue.

According to the prevailing trends, every 4 out of 5 consumers search to find local information. And, local searches play a significant role in sending around 70 per cent of consumers to a physical store.

There are also other pro-business aspects of local SEO. It can help people to make decisions in favour of your business. When consumers have more information about your business, they tend to trust your business more.

Here are the most effective steps for local SEO:

#1. Quick Tweaks

First, check the overall health of your site. And ensure that you do away with any issues that might negatively impact the overall local search performance.

It will help if you make your website more local-centric by adding a more descriptive contacts page and embedding a Google map right into the site.

Do not fail to fill your site with more content to boost your E-A-T score by filling the site with more content. For example, you can write your services page elaborately to fill the page with more content.

Also, you should send more local signals to Google by adding a phone number on Google My Business and writing the key contact information–business name, address, and phone number– at the footer of the page. Such information can help Google understand that you are a location-specific business and relevant for their search query.

#2. Maintain Your Google My Business Page

It will considerably help if you maintain your Google My Business page. You should add more images to the page, like customer interactions, storefront, logo, etc. It can help you build authority and trustworthiness to your listing, helping users decide to contact you.

Do not fail to respond to customer reviews. It can show customers that your business is up and running.

If you see many people visiting your website from the page, you can assume that your business offerings are popular among consumers. As such, you can make better marketing decisions. For example, invest in better pictures.

Importantly, do not leave any blank fields within your Google My Business listing. For example, you should mention if you offer insurance, have a parking space,wheelchair-accessible entrance, and stuff like that.

Moreover, add FAQs to tackle some of the top questions asked around your area of service.

#3. Enrich Your SERP

You should focus on your SERP strategy to enhance your local SEO. Here are some practical tips to enrich your brand SERP and that can positively impact your business’ local organic presence:

• Do not undermine your presence across review platforms. If your website does not have much content, it will help if you improve your website’s look across platforms.
• Add rich site links to enable users to navigate through your website quickly. And the links can also direct them to pages where they intend to land.
• Fill up as many SERP fields as you can. Add site links, have enough content to rank, and be present across social media platforms.

#4.Improve Content

You should improve your website’s content. And it will help if you look at your competitors’ websites to discover the untapped keywords.

Study your competitors’ content and develop actionable insights. You can improve your meta tags, trust signals, and local identifiers throughout the website.

Such improvements can help you to have a website that focuses on user intent to attract and retain them on your website.

With a quick website audit, keyword research, competitor research, and overall SERP review, you can tweak your content to improve your local SEO.

You can add more local signals to the main page, like the additional areas apart from the local area of your business. Moreover, you should not fall behind in enriching your website by adding valuable, relevant and engaging content.

Remember that the more content you add to your website, the more space you have to swoop in location references important to search engines.

It will help if you act smartly by doing a competitive analysis by understanding the key difference between organic and local search. You can start by reviewing your rivals that rank high in the local pack and then move on to competitors that beat you in organic search.

Also Read: SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION COMPANY IN NOIDA

The Key Local SEO Ranking Factors

Let us summarize the key local SEO ranking factors, which are:

Relevance

It relates to how well people’s searches match with a local listing. For example, if you add detailed business information, it can help Google better understand your business. As such, it can match your listing to the most relevant searches.

Distance

Distance dictates how far your business is from the location of the search. If a user does not specify any location in the search, Google will regard the distance on what is known about the search location.

Prominence

It is about how well Google knows your business from the information available across the internet, such as links, articles and directories. Usually, more reviews and positive ratings improve a business’s local ranking.

Knowledge about these key local SEO rankings can help you to craft a perfect local search optimization strategy.

Conclusion

Today, you cannot ignore the need to optimize your website for local searches. And you can be successful only if you adopt the correct practices of optimization.