What is local Search Engine Optimization? When you want to find a restaurant or a nearby mechanic, what do you do? You search for it online! When you have a medical concern and you need the phone number for the closest clinic, what’s your plan of action? To Google it, of course. Since approximately 46% of searches on Google are of local nature, businesses everywhere are investing in local SEO strategies.
FACT
“Nearly half (46%) of all Google searches consist of users seeking local information. These local searches consist of people searching for businesses in their local area or within a specific service area.”
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO is a type of SEO that refers to the placement of your business’ website in the local search results when someone types in your business’s name into Google. For example, say your business’ name is “The Golden Crust”. You would want your business’s website www.goldencrust.com.au to appear as a result of the search.
But how would you go about getting your website in the local search results? There’s no one size fits all approach to SEO. Instead, each local area should have a particular target customer base. If you are in the food industry, for example, you might choose to focus on the fast-food industry.
Why You Need It
So what’s the big deal about local SEO? As you probably know, local search is a hybrid of paid search (the type you’re probably familiar with) and organic search (the other type that’s not as popular). However, with online customer feedback increasingly influencing businesses’ decision-making, it’s no wonder that Google Search has made more adjustments to local queries, in order to satisfy consumers’ increased interest in proximity-related matters. You may also be familiar with the standard set of keyword phrases and phrases related to those key phrases (the exact format of your SEO keyword list is an industry-specific secret that should be closely guarded). As with all aspects of search, the type of local SEO you perform depends on your goals and your target audience.
How to Get It
Local SEO strategies are twofold. They involve a concerted effort to optimize your website, to make it easier to find and easier to navigate and to improve your sales. But these efforts go well beyond a good website. You need to leverage these efforts to get your physical businesses visible and drive new traffic to your website.
For a thorough understanding of local SEO strategies, you must conduct thorough keyword research. Search engine algorithms are highly specific in their strategies. If your competitors are doing local SEO in your niche, you don’t want your site to perform poorly. That’s why you need to be really sure that your local niche is one that would be competitive in the search engine results.
How to Monitor Your Rankings (Google My Business)
It’s a good idea to check your ranking several times a month. If you’re not tracking your position at all, then you have no idea how you’re doing. Fortunately, you don’t need to go through some complicated mathematical formula to determine how to monitor your local SEO or your local business page’s ranking. You only need to go to your Google My Business dashboard and hover over the Performance box. This will bring up an overview performance of your page, like how many users viewed your page. You’ll also see how many people have conducted a search for your brand over the past 28 days.
How to Optimize Your Site’s Content (On-page SEO)
This is the bit that really matters for the local search engine optimization (SEO) process, and that’s the content. Particularly the blog posts and your website pages. As a general rule you need 1 page for every “target keyword” or target phrase. Search engine crawlers scan the pages of your website to gather information on your site. They are looking for keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business and are much more likely to be relevant to your target customers, i.e. local searchers.
So if you are running a bus and coach company specializing in tours from the Las Vegas area to the Grand Canyon, you want to use terms such as “tour companies,” “travel agencies grand canyon,” and “tour grand canyon las vegas.” So what are the most important keywords for your local search engine optimization strategy? Well, they can be as simple as the name of your business, the town it is in, the state it is in, or even the street address of your location.
How to Build Links in the Best Places (Off-page SEO)
What is off-page SEO? In the broadest possible definition, off-page SEO is creating links to content on other websites, including blogs and forums. A good off-page SEO strategy can help drive leads and sales to your site. Building links is one of the easiest ways to get noticed by your target audience and serve as an incentive for them to engage with your content and buy products.
When you’re trying to rank for a long-tail keyword, creating good content is essential, but creating good content in a vacuum is nearly impossible. While traditional content engines such as Google index content fairly well (which is why traditional SEO is often used to build quality backlinks), content produced in an unattractive, old-school WordPress-based website won’t rank very well. You need to make sure your website links to your Google My Business and your www.top4.com.au page alongside social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Conclusion
When it comes to your digital marketing, it’s crucial that you understand the different stages of search engine optimization. The three most prominent stages of SEO are keyword research, keyword optimization, and meta-searches. Understanding each of these stages is the first step to getting ahead of the competition.
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