Local SEO is a vital tool for all organisations. If you consider that 80% of users use search to find local details and information, that means that if your website isn’t locally optimised, you’re losing up to 80% of your client base. In our books, that’s not a good strategy if you want to attract local business.
Local SEO is a highly competitive field, and numerous businesses will be aiming to achieve the top of rankings. With the improvement on Google’s local SEO analytics and metrics, the objective of finding the right local SEO strategies would ensure that you have the edge over your competitors.
Yoast SEO
“If you have a local business, like a shop, or have people visiting your office frequently, optimising your website is also about making sure people are able to find you in real life. But even if you’re not actively getting visitors in your building, but are targeting an audience that is located in the same geographical area as you are, you need to optimize for that area. This is what we call “local SEO.”
Best practices for local SEO in 2020
Maximise your presence on Google My Business
Google My Business is one of the best local SEO tools available, and it’s free to use. This tool helps you create your business profile, which can help more people look for your business. You profile would contain every important detail of your business, such as your contact details, address, business hours, and even images. Having an optimised Google My Business profile should generate a good volumes of local traffic, and gives you the edge on your competition.
Website Security
Many of your competitors will not consider this, but make sure your website security is completely up to date to minimise the threat of malicious content, viruses, and unreliable links. Search engines will pick up on any issues and the ranking of your website will suffer.
Generate visible reviews for customers in your area
Reviews are some of the most important factors users take into account when doing local searches, as user reception and input is something that they look into. Good reviews build better trust, and increases your authority in the internet. Users can leave reviews on your Google My Business page, on your social media accounts and you need to be seen be be acknowledging or replying to reviews. Reputation management is important for any business, and cultivating good reviews are essential.
Focus on Local Content
An important strategy for local SEO is the creation of quality content that provides relevant information that benefits the users, and helps generate possible leads. One way of achieving this is adding a blog to your website and publishing a good volume of location specific articles linked to your products or services. Use keywords that will make your site rank higher in the local search. Your keywords should be relevant to your customers. Build your valuable content around these keywords. This will help generate more local traffic, as users would be searching for certain keyword linked to a location that would lead them to your business.
Link building for Local SEO
Link building is a big win on all levels, and it can profoundly affect your local visibility, getting it the attention it deserves. Backlinks (links from other websites to your website) are going to generate relevancy points from the search engines if the source referencing you is reliable and trustworthy.
Local SEO strategies have become more dynamic than ever, with emphasis on improving your local search listing, to using social media and link-building to build your client base. Using these simple but effective SEO strategies would definitely give you that massive advantage in promotion and visibility in the end.
