Our Top 15 Tips For Better Your Local SEO Rankings

Welcome to our comprehensive guide on improving your local SEO rankings. In today’s digital age, local online visibility is crucial for businesses. If you want to stand out in your community and attract more customers, you’ve come to the right place. We’ll walk you through 15 tried-and-true tips that will empower you to dominate local search results. Let’s dive in and take your local SEO to the next level.

Local SEO is necessary to smaller businesses that operate on a regional instead of a national level. National SEO focuses more on ranking in searches across the country, while local SEO prioritizes appearing on SERPs in a specific location.

Local SEO is a strategy to rank higher in local Google Search Results.

In simple words, optimization of the local SEO strategy relies on marketing your brand ads, products, and services to attract local leads and more customers.

Optimizing your local SEO means you get more traffic, leads, and conversions, as your local customer base is more relevant.

“Since as many as 46% of the total traffic are local”

This thinking to help you compete more effectively against larger national brands that have massive resources to invest.

With you have focus on specific local SEO to-dos, you can neutralize the benefits of bigger brands that routinely optimize for broader keywords and rely on brand recognition, instead of value propositions, to bring in traffic.

Since as many as 46% of all search traffic are local, such SEO is incredibly beneficial for a business. Without local SEO, there are many chances your business is losing out on a huge amount of traffic. This guide will help you get started on Local SEO best practices and how to implement them.

Since we want to help you, today, we’ll teach you how to improve your local SEO right now through some tips and tactics that we’ve prepared for you to become an expert on the subject. Ready?

In short, local SEO strategies depend upon the brand marketing, promotions, and services to local audience and clients.

Why local SEO?

SEO is a technique used to increase the visibility of a physical business website based on its geographic location. In this case, the location is essential, and you should always keep that in mind in every SEO action you perform.

Bear in mind that many times, the intention of a website or blog is to promote a product or service that a certain group of consumers are looking for in a specific geographical area.

Now, it no longer matters whether you have a small business or a large company since as with normal SEO, you not only need to be found, but you must also stand out above your competition.

The above is relevant if we consider that local SEO is still a pending issue among most businesses and companies, so if you optimize your website to the max level, so that it appears in the first positions of local searches, you’ll already be obtaining a huge competitive advantage.

Here is the list of Top 10 Ways to improve your local SEO right now.

Now that you know that you must resort to local SEO to attract a greater number of customers and increase your sales, we’re going to indicate the most important points to optimize your strategy as much as possible.

1. Create and optimize your Google My Business account

Optimizing your Google listing is perhaps the most effective way to rank higher on Google Maps as well as gain visibility in Google Search local results. In order to get access to your Business Profile to make these optimizations, however, you need a Google My Business account associated with that profile.

Once you provide all of the requested information in your Google My Business account dashboard, all of that information will be added to your Business Profile, which appears in Google Search local results, the Google Search Knowledge Panel, and Google Maps.

To optimize your Business Profile on Google, follow the below points:

• Make a Google My Business account and verify ownership of the business.
• Next, give the correct and latest information.
• Add your logo, hours of operation, & payment methods from customers, all the information related to product & services with many images.
• Subsequently, ask your clients to write about your business product and services.
• Respond honestly and respectfully to customer reviews
• Create content within your account with Google posts

2. Regular Reviews from the Satisfied Clients

To increase the base of local clients, you should get more glowing reviews from satisfied clients. According to Bright Local’s 2017, Local Consumer Reviews Survey, 85% of clients believe that online reviews are the previous client’s personal suggestions.

Online reviews have a big impact on whether a potential customer chooses your business. Make sure you stay on top of online reviews with a strong strategy. Start by soliciting positive reviews from your customers to boot your online rating.

Here some tips to encourage clients to post review are given below:

• Generally, after the end of the sale, ask customers to write the review.
• Deliver a post-sale email for writing a review after screening through an internal survey. This step helps in avoiding unhappy customers.
• Make sure to always respond in a professional way to all the reviewers.

3. Check the NAP Consistency

NAP (Name, Address, and Phone) is the first point that you should keep in mind to improve your local SEO, but also about other aspects of your company, such as the services you provide, operating hours, and more. Every time you register your website in a directory or create a new profile, you should always put this data in the same way, without any variation.

This is because Google tracks this information on your website, online directories, and industry-related pages. If you change something in the contact information, even just a comma, you’ll confuse Google, and you’ll be losing points in its ranking.

Your NAP should be as accessible as possible, not only for Google but also for the customer. Google also picks up this information on other websites where it may be listed, and you want to ensure that it is consistent and accurate wherever listed. To check for any inconsistencies you can use the MOZ Local Search Tool.

4. Use Google Maps

Did you know that many of the local business searches aren’t done on Google, but on Google Maps?

In this case, your mobile device plays an essential role, since it’s what potential customers use the most to find the location and perform proximity searches. This means that users who find your business on Google Maps are potential visitors to it. That’s why it’s so important to have all the information updated, including pics of your business.

Also, don’t forget to insert the map where your business appears on Google Maps on your web page. You just have to search for it in Maps and copy the HTML code that appears there to share it on your website.

5. Start earning citations to increase your visibility and reputation

A citation is any mention of your business – anywhere on the web. It can be any combination of your business’s name, phone number, address, zip code, and web address (URL). Citations play a critical role in improving your local search results, so it is important to acquire as many as you can.

“A citation is any online reference of the name, address and phone number of a local business.”

Having strong citations is one of the first steps you can take to begin optimizing your local SEO. Citations are one of the foundational basics when it comes to local search so it is important to make sure they are accurate and are consistent before moving on to other aspects like link building, engagement, content creation, and reputation management.

Hosting a community event is one good opportunity. Another thing you can do is listing on local business directories. Here some of the most popular online business directories name like: Bing, Yelp, Foursquare, Facebook, Moz, MapQuest, City-Data, Local Guides, Yellowbook, Yellowpages, Spoke, just to name a few. There are many more.

6. Optimize for Voice Search

Voice search is the future, and it will multiply in the coming years. Therefore, in local SEO, it’s vital to optimize for how customers ask questions when they speak into devices instead of how they type out their searches.

Fundamentally, your customers use more long-tail keywords when doing voice searches compared with regular examinations. Due to this, you’ll also have to manage the SEO of your content to fit the more casual tone of someone speaking. For example, you’ll want to account for the regular question starters (who, what, when, where, why, and how).

It’s also essential to understand user intent when optimizing for voice. Usually, these searches are carried out when the user needs a particular piece of information.

If they’re cooking and ask Alexa to convert tablespoons to cups, they will be expecting a quick and practical answer. If a customer uses voice search to ask what your business’s hours are, this information should also be readily available.

7. Optimize your website for mobile viewing

A study by Percipient shows that the shift to mobile devices compared to desktops has been more drastic since 2020. Phone-based website visitors grew from 63% in 2019 to 68% in 2020. Local content can be particularly lucrative, with 18% of any mobile search that exhibits local intent producing purchases within 24 hours.

The above facts confirm that you have to optimize your website for mobile to be a player in local SEO.

Let’s check out some tips to achieve this:

• Make sure that the website should not take more than 3 seconds for loading
• Use more extensive, simple, and visible fonts that are easy to read for everyone.
• Use images and copy in a restricted manner, showing only the information you need (no room for filler on a mobile screen!)
• Ensure impulsive UI for great UX

If your local business is expanding into new cities and neighbourhoods, you’ll need to consider website localization. Again, it’s all about adapting your pages to fit with the local culture. For example, New York has the highest Hispanic population anywhere in the US, so if you’d be a branch there, it would be worth translating your site to Spanish and redesigning it with Hispanics in mind.

8. Make use of Location Pages or a Location-Specific “About Us” Page

Location pages are vital if your business has more than one location in an area. These pages need to provide the following, at a minimum:

• Store hours
• Name, address, and phone number
• Individualized descriptions
• Testimonials
• Promotional Events
• Parking availability
• Google Maps attached to each location page

Take care when you have multiple locations because you need to develop unique content for each page.

If you only have one location, creating an “About Us” page that focuses on local information is essential. For example, if you have a restaurant, your “About us” page is an excellent spot to mention your involvement in providing food to the homeless and needy people in your town or city.

9. Create content based on local news stories or current events

There’s nothing quite like authoring content that speaks or relates directly to a local issue to grab your local customers’ attention. Since many of your customers are also your neighbours, they share many of the same interests. Making your content unique and local is a terrific way to stand out from your competition.

Certain strategies include:

• Writing blog posts around local news stories, activities, or events
• Creating videos about local charities or causes that your business supports
• Setting up location-specific webpages on your website with high-quality local content if you serve different parts of a region.

Let’s just suppose you’re a small property company. You can create various pages, one for each place, where hyper-local content can be included in news or changes in the local real estate market. This strategy can also help you to position yourself at any particular location.

10. Use Location Based Keywords

To increase local visibility, you should use keywords that pertain to your industry and your location in your content and other related areas like your headers, image tags, meta descriptions, and so on.

Use Google’s Keyword Planner, and it lets you filter keyword searches based on location to know the popular

For example, if you’re local restaurant serves Indian Restaurant and Bar in Middletown, DE, include references to “Authentic Indian Food” or “Best Indian Restaurant in Delaware” on your site.

11. Create high-quality backlinks

According to Moz’s 2017 Local Search Ranking Factors study, link signals are the first- and second-most essential factors for local pack (or snack pack) results and localized organic results. Link signals are backlinks pointing to your site.

It’s crucial to get links to boost your local SEO, but their quality is essential.

Follow these tips to create quality links:

• Produce high-quality content on your site, issue headings so others want to link to your content.
• Use a trusted backlink maker tool
• Guest blog on authoritative high-level blogs
• Build links of the highest quality on your platform so that others choose to connect to your website
• Try to link-local influencers to your social networks or email

12. Social media is very useful

Social networks play an increasingly important role in local SEO, so you must optimize your business profiles and interact constantly to gain followers, opinions, and reputation. The better your content ranks, the better for your SEO.

A good practice is that in each new social profile that you create, you add links to your other profiles and to your website. Also try to choose the social networks that best suit your type of business, you don’t necessarily need to have a presence in all of them.

13. Create a separate web pages for each product or services

While all your products or services can be enticing to cram into one wide list, but don’t do it. Specify one page for every single product or service that you offer.

Your local SEO juice isn’t as powerful if you lump everything into one page because search engines tend not to see your brand as an authority in one specific area. This lowers your ranking possibilities..

If you’re a business without different products or services, but have various locations, simply utilize location-based copy for each page. For example, ‘Web Design’ would become ‘Web Design Services in Philadelphia’ or ‘Maryland Web Design Services’.

14. Optimize Your Site for Speed

Long gone are the days of dial-up and painfully slow download times. Customers expect their internet experience to be nearly instantaneous. Your website should be no exception. Websites that are slow and clunky to load (especially on a mobile device) have a much higher bounce rate. So slow-loading pages could be a gift to your competition. Monitor your page speed rates and do what you can to make them as fast as possible. The easiest way to see your page speed score and get optimization tips is to visit Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool and add your URL.

15. Work on the SEO on-page of your website

Although it is important that you focus on positioning your business for local searches, you shouldn’t forget that even if your SEO is local, it is still SEO.

This means that you must:

• Monitor the loading speed of your web
• Create a clean architecture of the entire site
• Make correct use of keywords
• Redirect pages to avoid 404 and 301 errors
• Optimize your content strategy

Looking for More Local SEO Tips?

Improving your local SEO takes time. As a business owner, it may not be time that you have to give. If you need help implementing your local SEO and increasing your traffic, talk to our team. We work with businesses to develop strong local SEO strategies that focus on getting conversions. Contact us for a free consultation and let’s talk about how we can help improve your local SEO marketing strategy.