Introduction
Local visibility is significant for any small business; local has branches or operates through franchises. In 2020 itself, 93% of buyers searched for local businesses on the Internet. 18% of the time, a local search will result in a purchase within a day compared to 7% of non-local searches. Therefore, showing up in local searches can do more for your business than you can imagine.
Why You Need A Distinct Local SEO Strategy
While most people do take care of the global SEO requirements of their website or content, they seldom take constructive steps to create and implement a solid local SEO strategy. It can make all the difference between a moderately performing business and a successful one. If most customers of a company or branch come from a particular region or locality, focusing on and catering to them in terms of topics and keywords will help increase your profits.
Tips To Improve Your Local SEO Ranking
Contrary to popular belief, it is not a Herculean or costly process to implement a robust local SEO strategy. While you must be consistent and patient in your efforts, the steps themselves are straightforward. Here are some of the ways you can boost your local SEO performance:
- Create or claim your Google My Business and keep it complete and up-to-date. Ensure that you add labels, categories, website, NAP details, and a detailed description here. Also, add recent pictures for customers to refer to and get your business verified.
- Add, clean up, update, and maintain your NAP citations.
- Ensure that you sign up and add your business to as many local and niche directories as possible.
- Always ask your customers for their honest reviews. Customers tend to look for company reviews on GMB the most, but studies on other sites are equally important.
- Respond to every review of your customers, positive or negative, and do it promptly as 20% of customers will be expecting one within a day.
- Ensure that your site is optimized for mobile or create one for the same as 61% of mobile users prefer to choose a local brand if their site is mobile-friendly.
- Also, your site should be optimized for voice search. After all, in 2017 itself, 58% of were using it to access local business information.
- Concentrate on local matters when creating content.
- Use more local keywords for your website and content SEO.
- Build strong backlinks to improve local authority.
- If your brand operates at multiple locations, have separate location-based pages to promote that region’s most popular products.
- Create rich snippets with schema markup focusing on local information.
- If you have an existing local SEO strategy, reassess it and keep it up-to-date.
Conclusion
Local SEO can be one of the marketing tactics with the highest returns, especially for local businesses. And the best incentive is that it can be free. One should never build up their SEO plan without investing a significant portion in local SEO.