Showing up well in local SEO rankings has never been more important. Some business owners may be unaware that there is a difference between SEO and local SEO. The goal of local search engine optimization is to help your business appear in the search engines on a local level. For example, it won’t do your local St. Louis pizza shop much good if your business listing appears in Orlando, Florida. Luckily, Google is smart enough to know not to display your listings in obscure places like in this instance—but part of this is also due to smart optimization.
If you own a small business, you have plenty to gain from a focus on local SEO rankings. The principles of local SEO are the same wherever your business is located. If you have a physical location from which you conduct walk-in trade or if you offer a real-world service, local SEO is a fundamental online marketing necessity.
Get your copy of our Local SEO Rankings Checklist.
Local SEO Rankings don’t just happen
While your website can be seen by the world, your goal should be to get it in front of the audience most likely to be a revenue source for your business. There are several factors involved in improving your local SEO:
- Getting your business listing added to relevant directories and listings. Getting your business listed in online directories like Google My Business, Yelp, Angie’s List and others is a great way to increase your local SEO. Equally as important is ensuring that your business information is consistent across all sites.
- Monitoring your online reputation and reviews. Managing customer reviews is key to achieving high rankings in the local search results. You’ll need to leverage positive reviews as well as mitigate the negative ones.
- Social Media. It’s a great way to build know, like, and trust with your customers and potential customers. It helps you stay top of mind, let people know about specials and promotions, and build a loyal following. But it also sends important social signals about your business to the search engines!
- Creating and Optimizing content on your website for local SEO. Start by knowing where your website stands currently in terms of SEO ranking. Having content about your community, neighborhoods, events and local happenings, the services you provide and the areas you service is very important to help your website rank for local searches.
Website content is important as well in achieving great local SEO. Content should be as relevant as possible to the search terms you expect people to use when they look for the product or service you are marketing. Consumers of your content should be able to make practical use of the information you publish.
Any content currently on your business’ website that is questionable in terms of usefulness should be replaced with something more meaningful and relevant to consumers. Any new content added to your site should focus on engaging visitors so that they will want to stick around and consume.
Download the Local SEO Rankings Checklist
If you want to learn how to improve your website up for local SEO, download our Local SEO Rankings Checklist.
How do you compare with your competition?
If you find your checklist is lacking and you need assistance in improving your local SEO, Changescape offers a free competitive search ranking report for this purpose. Just complete the online form and we will run the report for you. Once you know where you are now, we can help you develop a strategy to get where you want to be.