You might have heard about local SEO before, but have you ever wondered how it could benefit your business? The pandemic wreaked havoc on the economy last year and it probably hit local small to medium-sized businesses the hardest—you’re probably all too familiar with this.
Lucky for you, Improving It is pretty much what I’m here to do. I plan on leveraging years of SEO knowledge, my experience working with countless other clients and taking their business to the next level to provide you with the resources and knowledge to achieve the same.
Today, I’m going to talk to you about the many benefits of Local SEO, how you can go about doing this, and—most importantly—why you should be investing in Local SEO for your business in the first place.
First things first—what can you get by investing in your website’s SEO? What are the benefits of Local SEO as they relate to growing your business? Well, Local SEO is one of the most effective ways to get people near you to notice your business.
Over 76% of all the people looking up local establishments later visit them the same day according to Google. If you consider how many of those people could be potential customers, you’ll begin to see what a gold mine you’re missing by not investing more time and energy into your Local SEO strategy—or by not letting an expert do it for you.
If this doesn’t sound like what you’re looking for, or if your business isn’t quite local, how about you look into ‘national’ SEO?
Now that you know all the benefits of Local SEO for small businesses, let’s talk about what an effective SEO strategy needs to look like.
The best SEO strategies are ones that offer a multipronged approach. In the digital marketing world, this is referred to as taking a holistic approach to SEO. This ensures that you’re doing everything you can to position your website for sustained SEO success for years to come.
Here are the main areas a comprehensive Local SEO strategy needs to target.
Technical SEO is a very complex topic, but at its core it involves ensuring that a website is up to Google’s and user’s standards, is indexed (i.e. Google knows about it), and has quick page loading speeds.
No one wants to spend time on a website that takes too long to load or isn’t easy to navigate, and Google will notice that.
This kind of SEO is probably what most people think of when they hear SEO or search engine optimization. It involves the process of making sure that your target pages (e.g. your homepage, product/service, or service area/location pages) and blog posts are strategically optimized for relevant keywords. On-page SEO elements include a page’s title tag, meta description, H1 tag (there should only be one per page), subheadings (H2-H6 tags), and the actual content itself.
On-page SEO is important because your goal is to make sure that every one of your target pages & blog posts rank as high as they can for their focus keyword(s). While adding keywords here and there throughout your page’s content is simple, creating compelling sales copy that actually sells is not. Brian Dean has a fantastic article dedicated to SEO copywriting that I highly recommend.
While technical and on-page SEO have everything to do with your website, off-page SEO involves all the things you do off your site. For local businesses specifically, this includes Google My Business profiles, Bing Places, business directories, local directories (e.g. chamber of commerce), as well as social media accounts like Facebook and Instagram—to get your website noticed by the maximum number of people possible.
To be very clear, social media marketing is its own marketing discipline but is related to off-page SEO as it relates to local SEO.
The purpose of off-page SEO as it relates to local SEO is to build internet “trust signals” through backlinks, customer reviews (Google My Business, Yelp, etc.), and social awareness.
Now, covering all your bases isn’t as hard as it sounds – and here are some ways you can work on your website’s SEO yourself.
Before we move on to the details, what does “indexed by Google” even mean? In simple words, you can think of Google’s index as its own copy of the internet. When someone performs a Google search, the search engine looks through its index to find the correct search results. If your website isn’t on there, all the SEO in the world can’t help it.
So before we make any updates to our website, the first step is to make sure your website is indexed, and you can do this in a number of ways:
We just talked about how Google Console is a tool that helps people check whether their websites are indexed or not, and for many other SEO purposes too. Sitemaps, on the other hand, are exactly what they sound like – basically a detailed map of how users would navigate different pages on your website, how many pages are on it, and how they’re all connected.
There are also a lot of other details about your website on the sitemap, like details of all the media and videos on it, and when they were last updated.
One of the best ways to make your site get indexed is to simply give Google details on your website. Think of it as gently tapping it on the shoulder and saying “hey, so I have this website and I’d like you to keep it in mind for the future.”
Google notices how long people spend on your website and how useful they find it. In fact, Google has publicly confirmed that website load speeds are an official ranking factor. It really won’t be a good look for it if it puts a poorly-performing website on top, which is why you need to make sure your website isn’t one of those bad quality ones. You can use Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool to easily check your website’s speed.
You can do this by
HTTPS is a secure version of HTTP, a system that is used to communicate from your website servers to wherever your website is being accessed. The internet is rife with all kinds of scams, from identity theft to outright fraud, and making your website as secure as possible is only in your best interests. In addition to making your website more secure from a technical perspective, it will also look more secure from a potential customer’s perspective. HTTPS has also been an official ranking factor since 2014.
Now that we’ve covered technical SEO, let’s talk about improving your website’s On-Page SEO. This is often what most people do, but some tips and tricks are worth talking about as much as possible.
Keyword research is the term every SEO noob knows about—it gets thrown around a lot, and it seems pretty simple at first, but you realize pretty quickly that that’s not the case. In fact, your keyword strategy needs to be much more than just enriching your content with as many as possible (which, by the way, is not a good tactic).
Know what keywords are going to target a particular page, and keep track of it all in an excel file or Google Sheet (here’s a free Google Sheet template you can make a copy of to use). This will help you access that information quickly and stay organized, which is pretty useful – especially for large websites.
You can use free tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, and even the 7-day free trial of Ahrefs/ or SEMRush.
You should ideally map at least 3-5 keywords for each page. More than that will make it harder for you to focus on a single one properly, and less will make it hard to rank. The idea behind mapping keywords to specific pages is that each target page ranks for a specific topic while not competing with other pages on your own site.
Target pages are the pages we’re trying to optimize for a particular keyword, and here’s how to optimize them. Use Metadata smartly. You need to add keywords to the media descriptions, use the right meta description and title, as well as the right H1, H2, and even H3-6 tags in the content itself.
When writing the website copy, write content that speaks to the reader, that keeps them engaged, and never forget to include a clear call to action in the end. What’s the right way to do all this, you ask? Well, that’s extremely subjective, which is why you might need to talk to an expert if you don’t think you can handle it yourself.
By now you know most of the important parts about optimizing your website, but what about promoting it elsewhere, building a backlink profile, maintaining a social presence, and all that other stuff content marketers and SEOs do?
As we’ve noted above, content marketing and social media marketing as a whole are their own marketing disciplines, but they are related to off-page SEO as it relates to local SEO.
When it comes to local off-page SEO, one of the most important things to be mindful of is your business’ NAPW, which is an acronym that stands for “Name, Address, Phone, and Website.” When you create online business profiles such as Google My Business or Facebook Business, it’s imperative that you have accurate NAPW for each listing. Off-page is all about building internet trust signals for your business, so when Google ‘sees’ a website that has inconsistent addresses or phone numbers, it doesn’t “trust” it as much.
If you act on just one piece of advice from this article, let it be this. Google My Business is more important than it ever was before, so there’s really no reason to ignore it.
Google My Business helps you make your business show up on Google maps, on the right side of the search results when they look up your business name, helps customers be able to post reviews and so much more—you really can’t afford to miss out on this opportunity. Additionally, Google My Business reviews can improve your website’s local ranking, so try to always encourage customers to leave positive reviews.
Doing so will keep the right people from finding your business and take their money elsewhere.
After Google, Bing is the most popular search engine in the world. In the interest of keeping all your bases covered, you need to make sure you have a presence on BingPlaces just like you do on Google My Business.
It goes without saying that you need a social media presence, but the specifics depend on the type of business, your branding strategy, and your target audience.
Only make accounts that you’re sure you need, take advantage of social media management software to make sure your social media is well planned and consistent, and always make sure to direct your followers to your website – the end goal is to make more sales and to tell people about you.
Make sure your business is listed anywhere people might go to find a similar one – including directories. This may be more useful to some businesses than others, but it’s an important option nonetheless.
This means sending out accurate and complete information about your business to all the business directories that you may need to know.
The end goal of doing all this is twofold:
In the end, we can all agree that local SEO is both simple and complex, depending on how you look at it. On one hand, there are only three basic things for you to focus on, but on the other, all those areas are complex and seem easier to practically work on than they might be.
Which one of these tips will you be acting on for your website? Are you able to tell which tactics your competitors are using?
Let me know when you schedule a call or with me to discuss your website’s local SEO and situation further.