What is local SEO?

As one of the SEO approaches, local SEO focus on the company and increases local awareness to boost interactions with your local neighbour. It utilizes this process to expand the market. Today it is vital for companies to embed localization in their market strategies because 97% of online searchers are looking for local businesses, and 78% use mobile, so it is crucial to appear on maps. Also, you can be more competitive, and your rivals utilize this opportunity to enhance their online visibility, especially the Google Business Profile. Furthermore, many tools and features exploited online by businesses changed local awareness dramatically. Now the question is, what makes up local SEO services? It would help if you worked on several areas to implement local SEO. Some of the essential parts are:

• Google Business Profile
• Website technical functionality
• Website content
• Citation and links
• Reviews
• Social media

We are going to expand on these activities below.

How to optimize Google Business Profile?

The first step is using maps and increasing the rank on map results. There are several maps out there, but Google map is the best because it works on 220 countries and territories and supports 40 languages. Also, it has 72% of all map searches market share, followed by 12%, 11% and 10% for Waze, Apple map and MapQuest, respectively. Before diving deep into it, we need to notice in organic search results (which reveal all SEO efforts) that there is a space for map results that we call Google 3-Pack, which shows three of the best match results on the first page of Google. So your company has a massive opportunity to compete with other niche competitors. The ultimate goal in local SEO is to be between 3-packs. To appear on a 3-pack map, Google considers three ranking factors which are:

1. Proximity: is the distance between your address and the searcher
2. Relevancy: that checks the company category, 3rd party category, and web content.
3. Prominence: includes the number of reviews, website strength, content and links.

To optimize your profile, you can publish information and content that categories by:

• question and answer
• images
• message
• booking and menus
• reviews
• business info
• posts

It would be best if you worked on this list to show Google that your business is active and provides valuable customer content and service; it should seem natural for Google’s algorithm.

• How to set up Google Business Profile

Now let’s talk about setting up the GBP. For the businesses, there are three primary pieces of information to publish on the profile. First, you must correctly write your company’s name, address, and phone number, which we call “NAP.” Also, the website address is essential as a fourth part. It would be best if you remembered it because, on the citation part, we should publish the same information on other websites. The second part is the category. Remember to select the most relevant category for your business because the algorithm checks it with your content. If you need clarification, the best way to find it is by searching for your competitors on the map and checking their categories. And the third is the description. Write the best explanation for your business by utilizing the best keyword you want to appear on a search result when your potential customers are searching.

• Different types of Google Business Profile posts

After submitting business information, it is time to share more content. To do that, you need to know the types of content you can create.

• News
  • you can share News about your business or niches, like blog posts and announcements.
• event
  • to publish events, think about sales events, meetup groups, fundraising and so on to boost your profile rank.
• offer
  • if you want to offer a discount or use coupons, you can create a post and share it with your target audience.
• products/services
  • you also need to list your products or services by description. Here is another place to use your main keywords.

How to increase clicks for local SEO

You know the ultimate goal of all efforts is to click. So the more click, the more sale. Local SEO is the same, and there are some approaches to increase visibility and clicks. For the first step, you can add several attributes to make your company’s profile more precise. For example, you can select service options, planning, crowd, amenities, accessibility, etc. The next step is enabling the message section that helps your customer to send you the message in case they prefer to chat with you. Another way to boost clicks is adding the Q&A feature, which helps a lot, and sometimes Google picks them as the quick answer in search results. So, try to use the main keywords in questions and answers. Creating posts on your profile is the most important part after business information, and it shows your business is active and helps customers reach you when they ask (voice search) or search on the map. The product/service section helps people to find out what your business can do for them in more detail. So, after adding the product/service try to use your main keywords on the description and add the price part to increase clarity. For those customers who prefer to book an appointment, there is a section that helps them and businesses as well to set up one of the web appointment services in the profile. Also, try to add more photos and videos on your profile because, for Google image search, it is important to show relevant results to customers. It would be helpful if geolocation is part of your local business. You can share your works and use online geolocation web services to add the latitude and longitude to the images. The last but not least option is review. Try to collect more reviews on your profile and add responses to each. Your answer for each review is vital, especially for negative reviews. Remember, the customers always check reviews. By adding the above options, you definitely boost your profile visibility.

The technical part of the website that helps local SEO

You know! The reality is the correlation between your Google Business Profile and your website will affect your ranking on the search result. The technical part (as a foundation of any SEO optimization) helps you a lot. For this step, you need to ensure your website structure works which means you should check the navigation structure, menu setup and meta description. Think about a flat design and follow “2-clicks” to help customers find their needs quickly. Moreover, use Keyword-friendly URLs and title tags structure. Next, you should take page speed seriously because it is one of the criteria that Google matters. The loading media files, scripts, web hosting, caching, CDN and other website features help your page speed or can ruin all your work. Then you need to take care of local markers. It includes adding your NAP on the header and footer of your website and connecting your website to your Google Business Profile by embedding the map on your website. The other feature is “Schema Markup.” Today it is your trump card because most businesses do not use it. It can rich your snippet on the search result and help search engines to use them to help recognize data.

How to create content for local awareness

We mean to create local content on your product/service page, the home page, blog page, contact page and, if it is applicable, on your location page. For some tips, you need only to use contents that belong to you. Do not copy other websites’ scripts because Google will penalize your ranking. Try to follow one webpage, one topic. It can help you to work on the SEO of them separately. Also, make your content long enough to allow Google to realize what you are talking. Absolutely there is no solid answer for the word count of your content, and you need to check your competitor’s pages for that but because of the tons of content out there, think about more than 2000 words and above. Furthermore, use multimedia on your pages and blogs and localize your pages as much as possible. Adding images to your website has at least three benefits:

1. help Google search images to find your pages
2. enhance your page optimization
3. create link opportunities for your business

Also, remember to add image SEO that are file name, title and alt tag and use your main keywords to create them. This information should be relevant to the image and do not use logos and text on the photos. For some ideas about local content, we suggest writing about local events, local News, and community-based content. They are much more helpful in getting local ranking.

Citation building importance

what is a citation? Citation is mentions of your business online with or without a link. It is one of the Google ranking factors, and the importance is search engines reward good companies rather than good link builders. We have two kinds of citations:

1. structured

• • This type of citation includes directories and review sites. It is more important than unstructured. You need to mention your website by order of Name, Address, and phone number.

1. unstructured

• • This second type includes blogs, local media, and social media. Structured indeed has more weight in the eyes of search engines, but you still need them. The order of mentioning your business is name, phone number, and address.

They help tell Google exactly where you are located and then, in return, increase the chances of Google returning your listing for local searches. Every business, based on its industry, has different citation needs. So you should work on three kinds of citations: generic, niche-relevant, and geo relevant. You only need to be mentioned on some websites. Actually, you have to submit your business to the most important of them with high domain authority. (between 25 to 50)

Online reviews & local SEO

One of the main ranking factors for your business on map and website(if you use schema markup) is review. Therefore, you should choose the right review platforms for your business and create a system for them. In addition, you need to have a workflow to manage reviews and respond to them all the time. Good or bad. Another usage of reviews is to consider them as social proof. For example, you can mention them on your website as testimonials that boost your customers’ trust. To get more online reviews, you can send a “thank you” email to happy customers and ask them to submit a review by providing the GBP review link or other platforms like Facebook, Yelp, etc. Remember to follow up if you are still waiting for a response. But the question is how to deal with negative reviews. First of all, you need to know Google and other platforms will take the review down if it is off-topic, spam, offensive, personal info post, or fake and also if it is from your competitors. Bear in mind that responding to a review is not just for the reviewer. All audiences will see them. We recommend for each review, do the following steps:

• accept what happened
• take responsibility
• mention what you did to fix the issue
• ask the reviewer to connect you
• if you fixed it, then ask them to change the review or remove it.

Social media & local SEO

Social media is crucial these days to enhance your online visibility, and on local SEO, it works as well. But based on what experts said, social links do not pass “link juice.” It means it will not affect your ranking directly, but obviously, because they can redirect traffic to your profile or website and helps to promote your content, you should utilize them. But how? First, try to follow important people on your local media and find local blogs, potential customers, vendors, peers, etc. Then it would help if you had plenty of time for linking, commenting, and sharing their content to be on their radar. Next, it is time to create social media-friendly content and share it on different platforms using relevant hashtags and tagging the right people.

Additional tips

As some additional tips to make your local SEO strategies more effective, we recommend to:

1. Focus more on local web content and reviews and be more consistent. Allocate specific times to update GBP, create geo content, and gain more reviews.
2. What you need to do if your rankings are not increasing:
   1. You have over-optimized the anchor texts. Check them and try to use other anchor texts like brand, keywords, link, etc.
   2. You have under-optimized the anchor text. That means you need to use more links or use your main keywords.
   3. Your keyword density is too high. Remember to create natural content so that if you have several exact keywords on your content, use synonyms to keep keyword relevancy and decrease density.
   4. You need more citations. Try to submit more structured sources. Remember to create citations for a long time so have a plan for them.
   5. You need more reviews. You need them. So try to ask more customers for it.

Here you can find our local SEO services, and we know you can boost your business’s local awareness with us.