Can You Do Local SEO?

Tips for an Effective Local SEO Strategy

When you incorporate local SEO into your strategy, it enables you to compete on an even playing field with larger businesses. This is an ideal opportunity for smaller businesses to improve brand visibility and drive quality traffic to their website.

Some interesting facts on why you should be using local SEO includes:

• Forty five percent of all Google searches are local
• Eighteen percent of local searches make a purchase within 24 hours
• Fifty percent of those using a smart phone to search local visit the store within twenty four hours

Now that you have the facts, you will want to start incorporating local SEO into your SEO strategy. Some tips you can follow include:

Google My Business

One of the first steps to ensuring you appear in local searches is to complete a Google My Business profile. Google My Business is an essential part of local searches, as Google will support, verify, and share the information they hold. When it comes to Google My Business, it's important to follow the steps below:

1. Create and verify your Google My Business profile
2. Encourage your customers to share online reviews
3. Respond to any reviews to keep engagement active, remember to specify your location
4. Be sure to verify your business. When Google knows you have an authentic business, your chances of appearing in local results increases
5. Keep your Google My Business profile up to date with contact information and operating hours

Social Media

Another important tactic to boost local SEO success is to engage with your audience via social media channels.  Google now takes shared content on social media seriously. When you have your Google My Business page updated, along with high quality images, you can share the information on your social media pages. 

Contact Information Must be Consistent

Another very important step to local SEO is to ensure you make it easy for potential customers and search engines to find your business. This means setting up your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number). Your NAP needs to be crawlable HTML text on your website for Google to display it in location based searches. 

It is essential your NAP remains consistent in your online marketing efforts. Don't make the mistake of only using your NAP in images, as images cannot be crawled by search engines the same as HTML text. The best place to have your NAP appear is at the top or bottom of your website, along with your “Contact Us” page.

Online Directories and Citations

It is important when adding your information to directories or citations that you are consistent. Discrepancies can cause problems, making it harder to enjoy local SEO success. Ensure everything you publish is spell-checked, does not include abbreviations, and that your address and phone number is accurate. Remember to add your dialling code in with your phone number.

When Google has different information regarding your business, such as phone number or address, it won't know which information is accurate. This could result in Google not ranking your business. 

Take the time to go through the online directories and remove any duplicate listings. 

Carry Out Regular Audits

It's very tempting once you have a Google My Business profile, your social media accounts are up and running, you have added your location to your keywords, and you have added NAP to all your web pages, to stop and think that your business will now grow. SEO takes time and dedication, it also requires ongoing monitoring and updating.

With everything now set up, you will want to carry out a local SEO audit. SEO audits help you understand where your website stands and any areas you need to work on in order to achieve your online goals.