Tips to Boost Local Rankings – Local SEO solutions

Local SEO is the process of increasing your business’s presence in local search to attract more customers and clients. 

There are many guides that show how to do local SEO from start to finish but some are daunting. We’ll make this as simple as possible so you can start getting ranked easily and fast.

First and foremost

Claim your Google Profile and optimize it.

Google gives every business a free GMB which is built for local listings and provides searchers with information about your business. Once you claim your GMB and update everything correctly Google will show your profile in the web search as well as on Google Maps.

Quick Tip:

Choose the right business type within GMB

Choose the right business category within GMB

Add the correct business hours of operation

Add photos (Businesses with photos receive 42% more requests for driving directions and 35% more website clicks)

Add your website.

Do local keyword research.

Knowing how local customers search for the products or services you offer is the foundation of local SEO. If you know your industry and customers well, then it’s likely you have some idea how they do this. But it’s still a good idea to perform some type of keyword research to expand your scope.

Optimize local landing pages.

If you’ve found that people are looking for products or services that you offer, we always recommend building out dedicated landing pages for the services or products being searched in the local area.

It makes sense to have landing pages for the services you offer but what you want to make sure you avoid is keyword stuffing. This is where you take your search term and services and stuff it within your webpage as many times as possible to get ranked.

Local citations and links.

These are likely a bit less important these days but, in our opinion, they are still worth it and will help.

Local citations are mentions of your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) online. They were voted the fifth most important ranking factor for local queries.

The reasons:

They help people find your business. Local SEO is not just about optimizing for google, but also other search engines people may use to find your business, such as Yelp, Bing, Facebook, Apple Maps, and any industry-specific directories.

They may also still help you rank as well. Even though they’re less important than they once were, they may still help you rank. If you’re in the United States., the best place to start with local citations is the three main aggregators:

• Data Axle
• Localeze
• Foursquare

The reason is that these services feed their data to many other websites and directories, so getting citations on these services can often lead to citations elsewhere without any extra work.

REVIEWS

Google has always said that “high quality, positive reviews from your customers can improve your business visibility,” and they’re the second most important map pack ranking factor.

How can you get more reviews?

JUST ASK.

You must be a little careful with this because it’s against Google’s terms to offer incentives to customers in exchange for reviews. But there are ways to increase the likelihood of a customer leaving a review without breaking Google’s terms.

Keep your website up to date and HEALTHY

Having an unhealthy site can lead to all kinds of SEO issues. This is true for both local and national SEO. If Google can’t efficiently find, crawl, understand, and index your content, you’ve got a problem.

There are many audit tools out there to help you find little issues with your site to keep the health proper. Aleada Media Group will do a quality audit for our SEO clients regularly, so you’ll never have to worry about the health of your site while working with Aleada.\

Closing words:

The most important part of local SEO is arguably claiming, optimizing, and attracting reviews for Google Business Profile. This is how google will give you the most exposure. Ranking higher in Google’s regular organic results is more about traditional SEO and targeting the right keywords, doing on-page SEO, and link building. If you have any questions about your company or SEO, shoot us a message and we’ll help you gain rankings and drive in new business.