Local SEO is crucial for smaller businesses that operate locally rather than nationally. Local SEO prioritises showing up on SERPs in a particular location, while national SEO emphasises ranking in nationwide searches. This strategy depends on marketing your company’s name, products, and services to local prospects and clients.
As the strategy is more pertinent to your local consumer base, optimising your local SEO results in increased website traffic, leads, and conversions. Consider this targeted approach as a technique to help you compete more successfully against larger, more well-funded national companies. Concentrating on specialised local SEO tasks may counteract the advantages of larger businesses that frequently optimise for broader keywords and rely on brand awareness rather than value propositions to drive visitors. Your business can miss out on a lot of visitors if local SEO isn’t used.
With that, our experts at TopRankings, the leading SEO Agency in Melbourne, prepared 10 effective and proven local SEO solutions to help improve your website:
1. Claim & Optimise Your Google My Business Account
The most efficient strategy to appear more prominently in Google Search local results and rank higher on Google Maps is to optimise your Google listing, often known as your business profile.
However, you need to claim your Google My Business account linked to that profile to access your Business Profile and do the necessary optimisations. Your Business Profile, which appears in Google Search local results, the Google Search Knowledge Panel, and Google Maps, will be updated once you have completed all of the information requests on your Google My Business account dashboard.
Do the following to make sure your Google Business Profile is well-optimised:
- Set up a Google My Business account and verify the business’s ownership.
- Provide current and reliable information.
- Add some images along with your logo, business hours, accepted payment methods, and the products or services you offer.
- Encourage your customers to give your company online reviews.
- Genuinely respond to customer feedback.
- Using the Google My Business dashboard, publish posts to your business profile announcing products, events, and special offers.
2. Update Nap Citations on Your Website
Name, Address, and Phone are referred to as NAP. Verify that your company is listed in the same manner on every page of your website by looking at how it is listed in your Google My Business listing. This is frequently done in the website footer, but it must be built so that the footer’s code still loads for each page to have the desired impact.
Create a page for each location you have if you have more than one, and then apply the NAP that applies to that location to that page.
3. Optimise Your Homepage
Your homepage should clearly state who you are, your location, and what you do. Make it simple for Google to understand these details about your business. Make this information apparent in your page title, header, and meta description tags.
If you’re using WordPress to create your website, you can quickly edit the page title tag by going to Settings > General on the left navigation. The Yoast SEO plugin also makes loading your page’s metadata simple, which leads us to the next point.
4. Optimise Your Metadata
There has been a continuous debate over whether or not page title tags and meta descriptions are still relevant. Whether or not they are still a ranking element, they nevertheless play a huge role in the initial impression a potential visitor receives of your website.
Your page title tags should contain the name of the city you want to rank for if you’re focusing on optimising for local SEO.
Improve your page title tags by including the city name and the product or service you provide. This will assist in clearly expressing what you do in that location and inform search engines where to locate you.
5. Target Local Keywords
Your keyword choice should be appropriate for local customers. Don’t you think it only makes sense?
You may limit keyword searches based on geography in Google’s own Keyword Planner to get an idea of your location’s most popular search terms. This enables you to compile a list of locally applicable keywords to focus on. Once you have them, you should use them in your website’s copy, URLs, and meta content.
6. Publish Content Based on Local News and Events
Nothing will catch the attention of your local customers like content that talks or is directly related to a local issue.
Some tactics consist of the following:
- Creating blog posts based on local news stories, events, or activities
- Producing videos promoting local nonprofits or causes your business supports.
- If you service multiple areas of a region, create location-specific webpages with excellent local content for your website.
Imagine you run a local real estate agency. You can create a separate page for each location to showcase hyperlocal content about current affairs or local real estate market adjustments. Using this method, you might also improve your ranking for any particular place.
7. Optimise for Voice Search
In the future years, voice search will experience enormous growth. So, rather than optimising how individuals write their queries, local SEO must consider how people ask enquiries while speaking into gadgets.
While conducting voice searches as opposed to standard searches, your customers use extra long-tail terms. As a result, you’ll also need to modify your content’s SEO to fit someone else’s more casual tone. For instance, you should consider the usual question openers (who, what, when, where, why and how).
When optimising for voice, it’s also essential to consider user intent because these searches are typically made when the user needs a specific piece of information. They anticipate receiving a prompt and helpful response if they ask Alexa to convert teaspoons to cups while baking. This data needs to be accessible in case a potential customer utilises voice search to enquire about your business’s hours.
8. Set Reviews as a Priority
You will need “votes of validation” that you are who you say you are, doing what you say you do, and located where you say you are as your company grows. If customers are gushing over your products and services, that’s an added plus. But reviews are a fantastic tool to achieve this.
The number of reviews you have on Google, Yelp, and Facebook will all be taken into account as part of the decision-making process when search engines attempt to determine the best results for a specific search question.
Yelp will always show up on Google’s front page. Play the game, then. Work on increasing both your Google and Yelp reviews. Building up reviews on the top search engine is always a good idea. Build up those reviews to represent you in a favourable light, as your Facebook page will probably appear on the first page of Google if your brand name is searched for.
While reviews might not be on your website, they are an excellent way to improve your website for local SEO.
9. Conduct Regular Website Health Checks Using a Site Audit Tool
Simple errors like missing title tags, broken pages, and ambiguous internal links can negatively impact your rankings. Use a site audit tool to get a list of the most frequent errors and major issues.
Remember to update the settings and crawl the mobile version of your site to check your mobile stats as well.
Now that it is obvious, local SEO solutions are regarded as relevant strategies. Therefore, if you’re searching for solutions to your local SEO needs, be aware that there are service providers who offer a full range of local SEO services to assist you at every step of the way.
10. Use SEO Best Practices on Your Website in Every Aspect
This may sound apparent, and it is, yet it is so frequently disregarded. In the end, adding bandages to a boat with holes could help, but it won’t make it sail across the ocean. If it is not properly cared for, it will sink eventually. The same applies to websites. This is your online home. Give it some tender, loving care.
Additionally, you’ll automatically generate more high-quality inbound links the better your website’s search engine optimisation, content strategy, and blog articles are. You want to promote quality links because they are a crucial ranking factor for local SEO and your organic ranks in SERPs.
We understand that this may seem a little overwhelming. Remember that local SEO is only a small component of a comprehensive digital strategy. Work with a reliable SEO agency like TopRankings to ensure a constant effort is put into optimising your website. Maximise your brand’s online presence with the best in the industry.
Optimise Your Local SEO with TopRankings
SEO is constantly evolving. It’s impossible to predict when Google will add new features to its SERPs for local searches, but you can anticipate these changes. Because of this, it’s crucial to monitor local SEO continuously. By putting these ten doable solutions into practice and working with our SEO specialists at TopRankings, you can ensure that your business not only benefits from profitable local searches but also has a strong foundation for when new SEO features are released. Contact us today to get your obligation-free chemistry call!
