Local SEO is vital if you want your business to be found in the search results when consumers are actively seeking the products/services that your business sells/provides. Top search rankings are responsible for keeping your phone ringing and local consumers walking through your doors. A solid local SEO plan helps ensure that your target consumer can find your business when they perform a local search.
Your on-page factors along with social signals, inbound links, NAP (name, address and phone) listings, and local listings all contribute to your website ranking in the local search results. Improving your position in the local results can drastically improve your website traffic, resulting in more sales and revenue for your business. The following eight tips can help you to improve your local SEO effort.
1. Make sure your local listings are all correct.
You should have a Google+ Business page, Bing Places for Business, and a Yahoo Local page set up. These are the listings that show up at the top of the local search results, so it is important that your business is listed with each in order to have a chance to show up in the local search results. Fill out each profile completely and make sure that your business name, address, and phone number is exactly how it appears on the contact page of your website.
2. Check for duplicate local listings.
It is very possible that you have duplicate local listings out there and you will want to perform a quick audit to check. If you do locate duplicate listings you will want to delete them. There are many services to help you with your local listing management. Our favorite is Moz Local because it is so simple to use and it is extremely affordable.
3. Make your customers aware of the review sites but don’t directly ask them for reviews.
Reviews are great for improving click through rates and consumers are more likely to click on a local listing that has several strong reviews. Instead of coming right out and asking your customers to leave a review you can send them a customer satisfaction survey email and at the bottom let them know that they can find you on sites such as Yelp and Google+. Again, you cannot come right out and ask them to leave reviews, so think of creative ways to let them know where and how they can find your local profiles incase they want to leave a local business review.
4. Keep your NAP consistent across the internet.
Your NAP (name, address, and phone number) needs to remain consistent every time it appears online. Use the same format every time you list your business. Avoid having variations of your address with different abbreviations and spelling. Moz Local, which we suggested above for checking for duplicate listings, is a great tool to check and manage all of your local listings. Edit any NAP variations you find and make sure to keep everything consistent.
5. Focus only on high quality business listings (citations).
Along with Google+ Business, Yahoo Local, and Bing Places for Business, some additional high quality local listings include YP.com, Yelp, foursquare, Local.com, Facebook, and Mapquest. There are some business listing services that will claim to submit your NAP to 100’s of business directories. Avoid these low quality listings because they can do much more harm than good. A handful of high quality listings will outperform hundreds of spammy ones.
6. Don’t forget link building.
Inbound links will always remain a huge ranking signal, so don’t forget to continue to build high quality links. A great way to gain some useful links is to create useful content that your readers will want to share and spread throughout the internet. If you have something newsworthy don’t be afraid to reach out to the local media and share information that you feel they might be interested in. This is a great way to get some powerful natural links the correct way.
7. Make sure your website has a contact page with complete information.
Many local businesses will have a contact page on their website that only features their phone number or email address, or just a simple submission form. You need to include your complete NAP on your contact page, making sure that it is the exact same format that you used on all of your local listings and business directory listings.
8. Keep your blog full of fresh content.
Your blog is a great marketing tool for engaging your visitors, educating them, and also attracting social signals. When you update your content on a regular basis you are letting the search engines know that your website is a source of information. You want to use your blog to stand out as the authority within your industry. If you are a local dentist then provide your visitors with the highest quality information. Consumers appreciate when a business goes out of their way to provide them with useful information, so make sure you keep your blog updated regularly.
These eight tips gives you a good starting point to make sure that you have all of the bases covered when it comes to local SEO. Keep in mind that local SEO is an ongoing process and you need to continue to produce content, build links, create citations, and monitor your local listing pages. If you are interested in a professionally managed local SEO campaign then contact us today and learn how we can help your business reach the top of the local search results.