More about Local SEO in a moment, ok?
The Internet is an incredibly vast place. Because of this wonderful invention, we can communicate with people around the world. If you own a business, this, in turn, can drive your marketing efforts and allow you to reach new customers. Fortunately, even though you have access to people around the world, you don’t have to look all over the world for your customers.
Ok, I know. Tell you something you don’t know, right?
How is your Local SEO?
If you are like many people on the Internet, you hear the phrase, Local SEO and you even think about Local SEO, but you haven’t really taken the steps. Oh, you have, so you say? No worries, wherever you are at, we are here to remedy that today.
Why Local SEO?
Local SEO exists as a way to promote your business in a local sense. It allows you to generate new customers based upon your location, which has a long list of healthy benefits. The benefits can increase depending on how you do business. For example, if you have a strong Internet presence, complete with e-commerce, you are set on the Internet side, but if you also have a brick-and-mortar store, you can benefit from the Local SEO. In fact, if you have a brick-and-mortar store, you pretty much NEED to have Local SEO.
Let’s explore what local SEO is, why your business needs it if you plan to flourish, and how you can obtain it.
What is Local SEO?
If you were to take the trillions of websites that exist in Google and then constrain all those results and only look at them by location, you would have what is called a “local search.”
The idea behind these searches it to further increase the usefulness of search engines. These searches allow for everyday people to find the products and services they need based upon their proximity to the searcher’s location. It makes sense, doesn’t it?
Now, to put that into context, Local SEO is the practice of optimizing a website so that it tends to rank higher than other websites based upon the location filter (or constraint). This can include everything from optimizing geographical information, to obtaining links from other local websites.
Why Do You Need Local SEO?
The reason you need local SEO is to perform better in local searches. This will make your website more visible to searchers, which in turn will bring more visitors to your virtual doorstep (or your offline, non-virtual doorstep, too).
As the number of visitors to your website increases, so too should the number of customers you can convert. This results in more profits, which in turn can be reinvested into your business so that you can expand beyond those initial goals.
The other reason you need local SEO relates to the way it can help your website build a digital reputation. Actions like building links to your website, becoming more visible in local directories, and improving the visitor-friendliness of your website, will all build authority for you and for your brand.
As your website’s local authority increases, subsequent SEO (search engine optimization) actions will become more effective. As you publish new pages, those will also tend to rank higher in local searches, just because you took those simple steps (and continued to take simple steps like this).
How Do You Acquire Local SEO?
There are many ways to approach Local SEO and the Local SEO Factors:
- Publishing listings on local search directories such as Yelp.
- Optimizing on-site factors, including displaying your business’s contact information, integrating geographical information for maps, and creating articles that focus on your customer’s local needs.
- Working toward receiving positive reviews from satisfied customers.
- Acquiring links from local organizations and businesses.
- Increasing your visibility on social networking sites, which in turn increases locale-centric buzz about your business.
- …and the list goes on (including even more tips in this article).
Bookmark this article on our site >> Local SEO.
The above list is by no means comprehensive. There are many ways to acquire local SEO, but each action should have a common goal. That goal should be to increase the appearance of your site in local searches in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
As you increase the usefulness of your website with a local focus, you will find that your website will tend to perform better in local searches. This leads to the acquisition of visitors whom are ready and willing to become loyal customers to your business.
What Are Other Companies Doing To Increase Their Results?
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David is the founder of Mallee Blue Media and a consultant to SEO and online marketing agencies. David’s work on local SEO has been published by Internet Marketing Ninja’s, SEM Rush, Lendio and others. Owner of Mallee Blue Media, an SEO and Content Marketing Agency for Small Business. |
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| graemezen | ||
| Adithya Murali | Adithya is the link earner, around-the-clock experimenter and community outreach ninja at TechWyse. He loves to blog, reverse engineer websites, and to be proven wrong. The last one was a lie. | |
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Doyan Wilfred |
Influence and persuasion expert. I love to learn and study what makes people click. (Fan of Dale Carnegie's 'How to Win Friens and Influence People'.) | |
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Questions we’ve been discussing:
- What is your experience/credibility in this area (bragging rights)
- What is your Local SEO tip, story, suggestion, how-to…?
Q. What is your experience/credibility in this area (bragging rights)
A. David Trounce (Founder of Mallee Blue Media)
David is the founder of Mallee Blue Media and a consultant to SEO and online marketing agencies. David's work on local SEO has been published by Internet Marketing Ninja's, SEM Rush and others, Lendio and others.
A. graemezen (Online Strategy Manager )
I am the Online Strategy Manager at The Zen Agency in Glasgow Scotland, we are a full service digital agency. I am reguarly inbolved in developing and implmeneting SEO strategies which also involves Local SEO for a number of clients
A. Adithya Murali (Community Outreach Specialist and Link Earning Ninja)
I'm one of the chief link earners at one of the largest and most reputed internet marketing firms in all of Canada, TechWyse. That pretty much sums up my credibility.
A. Doyan Wilfred
I've been helping folks like you to rank in Google.
I bring to the table my experience in building successful web businesses and my passion for human psychology.
I dab in the nuances of influence n persuasion.
A. Shyam Bhardwaj (SEO Consultant)
I love local search campaigns and reason, you just need to compete your neighbourhood stores and businesses. So doing the things right whatever they all are doing and implementing add-on stuff which give our clients, an extra edge to come up higher than region-specific competitors.
Q. What is your Local SEO tip, story, suggestion, how-to…?
A. David Trounce (Founder of Mallee Blue Media)
Collaboration is Key
Look around your neighbourhood for opportunities to partner with parallel, but noncompetitive industries. Thoughtful collaboration can literally double your exposure, creating greater brand awareness, click-throughs and branded searches – an increasingly important aspect of Google's search algorithm.
If you own a local hair salon could you collaborate with a nearby limousine service. The point of collaboration could be that you are often both involved in the wedding game. (Credit goes to Nathan Manning at Gorilla360 who provided this idea.)
Are there ways you can contribute or amplify one anothers' content and so improve your brand visibility in local searches? Google is looking for local citations and neighbouring endorsements in it's local search results.
Business services and eCommerce sites are ideal candidates for this kind of strategy. If you are in the liquidation business, could you contribute link-able content from a local accounting website?
If you sell educational board games, could you collaborate with a local school by offering some free educational games in exchange for a write up or mention in their online newsletter?
Effective link building can be a real challenge for local SEO and many business end up opting for low quality directory links. Today, these links have little to no positive impact on site ranking. But if you are able to collaborate with niches which somehow compliment yours or open the door to opportunities for one way cross-linking or cross promotion, you can improve both your brand awareness and search position over time.
A. graemezen (Online Strategy Manager )
My number one tip for being successful in Local SEO is ensuring a consistency of your NAP (Name, address and phone number) across third party websites. These sites include the likes of Google my business, Yelp, Foursquare etc. Search engines such as Google regularly look at these websites to gain a better understanding of your business and local areas as a whole, having a consistent NAP will give the search engine greater confidence in your business and your location. Tools such as Moz Local or Whitespark can be used to help you when fixing your citations.
A. Adithya Murali (Community Outreach Specialist and Link Earning Ninja)
Here is my 2 cents:
Geo Tagging
Geo tagging is a widely discussed topic, and surprisingly very few local businesses actually implement this. Geo tag everything that can be geotagged for your local business, period.
Matt Cutts pointed out that EXIF image metadata could be ‘potentially’ a google search ranking factor. And for local seaech marketers, EXIF image metadata is nothing but the geotags on media on local business websites. We have seen ranking increases and spiked for several clients just by adding geotags.
NAP consistency
The NAP (Name, Address, Place) details of local businesses must be consistent across all web properties where the business has been listed. It goes without saying that low-quality local listing sites should be avoided, but if you use them at all, the NAP consistency should be ensured. Simply correcting the NAP on the GMB profile to what's on the site can result in ranking boosts in both local and organic overnight.
Keyword Consistency
It is completely fine to use long tail phrases and target conversational keywords, but always go behind a small group of core keywords. Maintain consistency in keyword usage across all your local and directory listings, classifieds, and image alt tags.
A. Doyan Wilfred
A girl gets married and moves to her husband's native. She is new in this strange land and have no friend there.
But that doesn't stop her from exploring the new place. She relies on Google to find the address of her favourite coffee pub where she loves to hangout.
Your takeaways: get your business listed on Google. Pin your business with the business marker on Google maps. Display your phone number and address prominently on every page of your site. Make sure your address is correct and the same everywhere – on your site, emails and Social Media.
When she needs to find a grocer, she goes to Google. However she won't settle for any grocer. She wants the best. So she turns to the reviews.
Your takeaways: Focus on your customer care. But it is not enough, you can also give incentive, like a discount or a free sample to gently nudge your customers.
PS: In case you are wondering, this is my story.
A. Shyam Bhardwaj (SEO Consultant)
The key to get results – A complete solid strategy to follow. A perfectly optimized Google My Business listing backed up with Genuine reviews, lots of NAP consistent citations, lots of business mentions and GEO signals throughout the website. An embedded map on website, business address on every instance of website and location specific structured data markup. The primary goal is to get the Local Pack 3 and also improve organic rankings. And don’t forget that Local SEO.
Hi fantastic website! Does running a blog like this take a lot of
work? I’ve virtually no expertise in programming however I was hoping to start my own blog in
the near future. Anyway, if you have any ideas or
techniques for new blog owners please share. I understand this is off subject but I simply wanted to ask.
Kudos!
Hello there. If you have no expertise in programming, then it is likely that you are not a programmer and you would not be looking to program. I say that because I am a programmer and to presume that it can be learned in a few minutes would insult those of us who have studied for years and who have decades of experience as programmers. Is it possible that you may be confusing blogging with programming? You can be a blogger without knowing anything about programming. In fact, these days, with a blog/site set up correctly, you can be a blogger with basically no technical knowledge whatsoever. If you get in a pickle, you can hire someone like me to perform the technical tasks for you. But, with the right hosting company and the site set up correctly, even if you have to hire someone to do it for you, you are likely all set, even without technology.
Thanks for your feedback. Always appreciated of a good conversation 😉
[…] Read more… […]
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