Building a local SEO Strategy for your business

Establishing a solid local business strategy for your business needs to be step one if you’re trying to get your business to rank in your local area. Local SEO is essential to smaller businesses who operate on a regional level, as it can be a key component in outranking the top websites in your city. And if you can outrank the giants in your industry, you will notice huge improvements in your business’ revenue. 

We’ve written a comprehensive guide below that will help you dominate the local search market. Learn how to adapt your current SEO strategy to target your local area, learn more:

Create/Optimise your Google My Business Listing

This is a quick win for all businesses who want to push their business to the top in their local area. Creating or optimising your Google My Business account is perhaps the fastest way to appear higher up on Google’s search results page, as well as Google Maps. 

Fill out every information box that is available to you in order to maximise the likelihood that you appear in the Local Pack. 

Ensure that your company’s name, address and phone number are accurate across all platforms, and ensure that they are spelled correctly.  

Select as many categories that relate to your products and services as possible. It is absolutely vital that you do this as it’s an easy opportunity to to appear on the first page of Google.

Local Directory Backlinks

Take advantage of business directories such as Yelp, Bing and Yahoo which all offer the ability to post listings on a local level. It is important that you establish which directories will have the most effect in your local area, and target those ones with your strategy. Looking for directories that are both relevant to your niche as well as your local area will improve your trust factors in the eyes of Google. To find directories that are relevant to your website, try searching for “[your local area] + directories” and “[your niche] + directories”.

Choose secure directories that don’t look spammy. Check the website’s reputation and domain authority to ensure that you won’t be harming your own website by putting a link here.

It’s important to remember that these directories won’t help you create a strong backlink profile. The main aim of this activity is to create ties to your industry and local area so that Google is more likely to rank you well for Google searches in your city.

Your ability to rank for local searches is heavily dependent on the quality of your website. Establish a content strategy that includes one page per location you target with unique content and as much information as you can think of. A page on your location with information such as the name, address, phone number, Google maps, and testimonials will go far when it comes to ranking for your local area.

Reviews

If you know how to use reviews to your advantage, they can be such a powerful tool in your SEO arsenal. If a website has many good, trustworthy reviews, they can positively impact a user’s decision to work with your company. Your review strategy should include a way to get positive reviews of your goods and services on Google Reviews as well as other review sites that are relevant to your niche. Review sites that target your local area are perfect for this. Simply do a Google search for “best [your service] in [your area]” to see which review sites have the most presence on Google’s search results page.

Reviews can be acquired in a few ways:

Avoid spammy-looking emails as Google will notice this and it will not look good on your website.

Optimise for mobile

A huge amount of local searches are performed on mobile devices. This tends to happen while people are looking for products and services while on the go, and the mobile phone is an easily accessible search tool for these people. This means that it’s hugely important that you optimise your website so that it ranks as high as possible for these searchers.