If you’re a small business owner, it’s more important than ever to rank higher in Google’s search results. With the right strategies and tools, local SEO can help your business get found by potential customers and clients—but it’s not easy! We’ve put together this list of 10 golden steps that will help you dominate local SEO:
Get your business listed
Now that you have a great website, it’s time to get your business listed on Google My Business and Bing Places for Business.
- Google My Business is the most popular listing service used by many businesses across the country. If you’re looking for more information on this service, check out our guide here: [link]
- Bing Places for Business allows businesses with physical locations in the United States and Canada to list their locations on the map under their own name or by category (such as “restaurants”). This can be especially helpful if you don’t have any listings in your own city but want people who live nearby to know where they can find what you do!
Use your NAP
The next step is to make sure you have your NAP (Name, Address and Phone Number) on all of your listings. Doing so will help Google know where to show your business, which means more visibility for you in the local market.
In addition to having the same NAP on all of your business listings, it’s also a good idea to use the same NAP when posting on social media or creating a Google My Business profile. This will get them thinking about how they can find out more about this person/business as well!
Add the right business name and category
The second step is to add the right business name and category. When you start a new website, choose a unique name for your business. It should be short and easy to remember, but also make sure that there’s a match between your business name and category. If you’re an accountant or attorney and want to advertise as such on Google Maps, then use “Accountant” or “Attorney”.
You can also use keywords in this field so that when someone searches for something related to what you do (like accountant), they’ll see your listing above all others!
Optimize your meta data
Optimizing your meta data is an important step in ensuring that your website is visible to search engines and people. To do this, you need to use the right keywords and titles, descriptions, images and alt text for each page on your site.
This is also an effective way of optimizing for mobile devices as well!
Optimize your images
In order to increase the chance of your images being found by search engines, you need to optimize them for each page. This means creating descriptive alt tags and using images with high resolution (Not bigger than 200KB). Make sure that the image is relevant to the page it’s on, and avoid using too big or small photos. In addition, adding closed captions can help improve click-through rates when users click through from a link within an article or blog post.
Build local links
It’s important to understand the difference between links and text. Links are a way for users to share your content on other sites, while text is the content itself. When you build local links, you’re essentially asking people who know about your business or site (or both) to tell others about it.
You can use any number of tactics when looking for opportunities:
- Research keywords related to your industry or niche within a specific geographic area
- Reach out via email or social media channels (make sure they’re relevant)
- Search Google Maps for physical addresses within that location
Build Google My Business reviews
Reviews are the most important ranking factor for Google. They’re how your business shows up on search results, and they help you get more traffic through organic (non-paid) searches as well as via paid ads.
You can use reviews to improve your rankings in local search by building trust with customers who have interacted with you in the past, or who will be searching for similar services in the future.
Here are some things that work:
- Get positive reviews from happy customers—both new ones and those who have been customers before;
- Promote a “review me” button on your website or app; Hire someone who is good at writing positive reviews; Ask friends if they have any ideas about how best to promote this type of content; Use social media marketing strategies like Facebook Live videos (if applicable)
Leverage social media channels for local SEO
Social media can be a powerful tool for local SEO. You can use social media to build relationships with your customers and prospects, provide value through content that is relevant to the area you’re in, generate links from other sites in the industry that are relevant or authoritative, build your brand through reviews on Yelp or Google+ (or both), and more.
In order to get the most out of using social media for local SEO it’s important to understand what these channels offer:
Create valuable, locally-focused content
You can use valuable, local content to drive users to your website. The key is to make sure it’s relevant and helpful for your target audience.
Here are some things you should do:
- Use keywords in the title of each piece of content you create; this will help search engines understand what kind of information they’re looking for when people search for “local SEO.”
- Include images or videos that show off the quality of your services, products or location—this makes them more appealing than just text alone (which is good because it’ll help get clicks).
- Add relevant keywords throughout each piece: include these terms at least once per sentence so they show up even if there isn’t a direct match between them and what was written in previous paragraphs!
Monitor and improve your local SEO performance
To monitor your local SEO performance, use Google Analytics to see how many people are visiting your website and how they get there. You can also see the keywords people are using to find you on Google.
Use the right keywords in your title tags and meta descriptions so that you can rank highly for those terms in search results.
Monitoring is an ongoing process that requires vigilance and consistency, but it will help you improve over time as well as provide valuable insight into what works for your business or organization.
Follow these steps and rank higher on the SERP
- Use the right keywords.
- Use the right keywords in the right places.
- Optimize your meta data, images and website content to improve ranking on local search results pages (SERPs).
- Build a strong local link profile by building links from high-quality sites on your target keyword phrase or brand name that are relevant to what you do. This can be done by building links from other websites within your industry or even using Google My Business to help boost your profile so that it ranks higher in Google’s search results when someone searches for something related to what you do as an online business owner/agency/etcetera…you get the picture! It’s important not only because it helps boost rankings but also because having quality backlinks helps build trust with potential clients who may come across them when looking at reviews of similar businesses nearby before making any decisions about hiring one over another; therefore increasing their chances of being hired based upon those recommendations rather than just random guessing games where everyone else gets stuck trying their best guesses…which doesn’t work out too well when trying reach results like this one:
We hope you’ve enjoyed this brief overview of the steps to follow when improving your local SEO. There are many different ways to do it, and depending on your business goals and budget, some of these may not be applicable for you. But if you keep an eye out for opportunities where we could help expand your reach by increasing traffic or visibility in key areas—like increasing reviews from local customers—we would love to hear from you!