Subscribe on YouTube | Full guide to local SEO
Video overview
In the above video, Matt Walsh from Style Factory shares 10 key ways that you can improve the visibility of your website in local search results.
Video transcript
In this local SEO checklist, I’m going to walk you through 10 simple steps you can take to ensure maximum visibility for your business in your area.
Before I begin, a reminder that to get all our SEO tips, do make sure that you hit the subscribe button and the notifications bell.
Ok, let’s dive in.
One — register your business with Google Business
Creating a Google Business profile takes just a few minutes, and is one of the easiest things you can do to improve visibility in local search results.
Once the Google Business verification process is complete, within a couple of days you should see your business included on Google Maps — and, depending on how many other similar businesses in your area have registered with Google Business, you may even find yourself occupying the top spot in your local ‘map pack.’
Two — ensure you’re using the right local keywords for your products and services
It’s essential to use product and service descriptions on your website that truly reflect what people are actually searching for in your local area. This means doing some keyword research.
SEO tools like Semrush can help here, letting you find the exact phrases that people are using when searching for products and services in your locality.
You’ll find a link to a special double-length free trial of Semrush in the video description.
Three — ensure that your location is referenced in key parts of your site.
Make sure that important pages on your site reference your location. You should include it in
- Title tags
- Headings
- Body copy
- Meta descriptions.
Four — submit your site to high quality local directories
Submitting your website to relevant local directories may help boost its visibility in search results.
It is very important however to only submit your website details to high-quality directories — not all directories are reputable, and submitting your site to the wrong ones can have a negative effect on rankings.
It’s also important to be very consistent when submitting your business’ contact details to any online directories — always enter them in the exact same way.
This is because if search engines regularly encounter conflicting contact information, it can raise a ‘red flag’ about the authenticity of your business, with negative implications for rankings.
Five — seek out online reviews
Encourage any customers who are happy with your product or service to leave a review.
This can improve your business’ visibility in search results in various ways, and encourage search engine users to click through to your site.
In particular, it’s worth focusing on acquiring Google reviews, as these are often displayed prominently in search results.
Six — Use Schema’s geographic markup
Adding Schema code to your site lets you provide search engines with information that helps them understand and index your content better.
And when it comes to local SEO, you can make use of a particular type of Schema — ‘geographic markup’ — that lets search engines (and users) know more about your business location. Check out the resources in the video description for more details about this and how to use it.
Seven — build backlinks that occasionally include location in anchor text
Backlinks are links from other sites to yours. They’re important in SEO because Google treats them as votes for your content — generally speaking, the more high-quality backlinks you have, the better your site performs in search.
To boost performance in local search, you should occasionally encourage site owners to include the location of your business in any backlinks they are creating to your site. This emphasizes the location of your business to search engines.
However, it’s important not to overdo this — too much inclusion of location keywords when link building can come across as spammy, and result in search engine penalizations.
Eight — create high-quality content that references your local area
Sites that feature in-depth blog posts on topics that people are genuinely interested in tend to perform well in search results.
This is for two main reasons: first, these posts are likely to be keyword-rich, making it likely that your content will be relevant to a wide variety of queries.
Second, if these posts are particularly good resources, other site owners will create ‘backlinks’ to them, which as we discussed a moment ago can improve rankings.
The same rules apply to local SEO — if you write high-quality blog posts about your business niche that involve the geographical area you operate in, you may find yourself doing very nicely indeed in local search results.
Nine — try to get local online coverage
It’s worth approaching local news sites asking for some coverage of your business.
Given the local angle, many of these news sites will be more than happy to oblige, and in doing so give you a backlink that may pass on a significant amount of ‘link juice.’
News sites tend to have a lot of authority, because many other sites link to them. This means that backlinks from them can be particularly influential.
Ten — ensure your website performs well on mobile devices
The majority of searches are now carried out on smartphones, and studies show that mobile searchers are more likely to contact a local business if they have a mobile-friendly site.
And for several years now, Google has been rewarding sites that perform well on mobile phones with better search rankings.
So, make sure your website always loads quickly and displays correctly on a smartphone.
And that’s that — our top ten tips for improving local SEO
There’s lots more to learn about the topic however, so do check out our full guide to local SEO on the Style Factory website. You’ll find a link to this in the video description.
To get more SEO tips from Style Factory, do make sure to like this video, subscribe to our channel and hit the notifications bell.
And finally, if you have any questions about local SEO, just leave them in the comments section. We read them all and will do our best to help.
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