Local Seo For Business Step By Step Guide

Local Seo For Business Step By Step Guide

Typically, your SEO helps your site to show up in search engine results from anywhere in the world. When you use local SEO, however, you can promote your site or your business to people who are near you. In this post we are going to learn all about local SEO. We will talk about why using SEO is important, how you can rank high with local SEO, and local SEO search ranking factors. We will discuss how exactly you can go about getting started with local SEO. We will learn about building citations and building reviews. We will also look into supercharging local SEO with photos and videos as well as a local SEO ranking checklist and other essential resources.

Why to Use Local seo

One important thing to note is that in order to use local SEO to its best ability, you need to have a proper physical address. If you do not have an address that you can publicly use for your site information, you will not get very much out of using local SEO. However, if you do not have a physical address that you can use in the area, you can still use some local SEO.

In this case, you would simply need to write a lot of content about the area you want your readers to be from. If you do this, your result should still show up in Google’s search results when people are looking for something in that specific area.

 Now let’s look into why exactly you should use local SEO. Local SEO is extremely important because it simply provides great results. It is a tool that can build your SEO quickly. It is also just another way to build your search engine optimization. If you’ve already done all of the tips and tricks we have talked about in this post so far and you want your website to still rank higher in Google’s search results, local SEO has another new list of tips and tricks that can help you achieve this. 

Local SEO is extra important if you are a small business owner with only one or a few in-person locations. It is important in this situation because you want your site to show up in the results of local searchers. If you have a plumbing company in Pittsburg, you probably do not care if you show up in the search results of people who are looking for plumbing in San Diego. You only really need to show up in local searches. In cases like this, you can focus mainly on local SEO tactics while you are building your site.
Also read: What is Seo Optimization

Local Search Ranking Factors

 Now that we have looked into what local SEO is, why you should use it, and how to rank high with it, let’s look into the local search ranking factors. Knowing this information will again help you to improve your local SEO simply because you know the basis of what makes you rank high or low or somewhere in between. One great tool to use in local SEO besides writing about your specific city of interest is writing about the towns that surround that city. People will drive away for things that they like or things that they want to experience.Because of this, if you also market to people who live in surrounding areas, you may get into their search results as well. If you have good content on your site that interests your visitors, they may choose you even over businesses that are physically closer to them.

 Another really cool thing about local SEO is that it does not have to contain only online pieces to help it succeed. If you tell people in person about your business, they may go home and look up your website online. If you have a billboard or put up flyers, people may see your name and search for you specifically on Google. If you have customers that are happy with your services, they may tell their neighbors and local friends about you as well, which would once again lead to people looking you up online and bettering your SEO.

Google My Business

 For local SEO, you will also want to do something called “Google My Business”. This is a Google service that helps businesses to share their own details. It allows you to go onto Google’s site and edit facts about your site or company. It will ask you to add all of your locations and to verify your business. This will allow your site to show up higher in the searches of local people because Google knows that your company is real. Google My Business also lets your customers log into its site and rate and review your business. If you have good reviews, your site will show up higher in local Google. 

If you have poor reviews, your site will show up lower in the search results.When you get reviews, you can even go a step further by responding to the comments that are left by your customers.You want to be very friendly in these comments. You also want to make sure that if you receive poor reviews you do not respond to the comments with a grudge or any other type of negative tone. If you get a good review, sincerely thank the person who left it. If you get a not so good review, sincerely try to help improve the negative experience the person had with your business. 

When you are interacting with customers online, Google suggests that you treat them like a friend. This well help to show that you care and will improve the way that local people see your business. Even if potential customers see bad reviews online, they will also see you trying to help solve the issues. This will help how people see you and your company which will in turn improve your business as well as your local SEO. 

Local Seo By Using Facebook

Another great tool for local SEO is Facebook. As we mentioned earlier in the post and as you probably already know, Facebook is everywhere. Not just is Facebook everywhere, but it seems like almost everyone in the world is on Facebook as well. Because of this, it is extremely important that your business is on Facebook and that it is represented well. Since people are on Facebook so much, it is pretty common for them to use it to find local businesses when they need something from them. 

They can do this by asking for recommendations or by simply searching for what they need in the search bar. If they have heard of your company before, they can look your Facebook page up to learn more about your business as well.Facebook also allows its users to review your business, so you can help your local SEO by responding to these comments nicely just like we talked about doing for the Google My Business reviews.

 A simple way to optimize your local SEO is to just add your city and state to your title. When you do this, Google is able to tell easily which local searches you should be entered into. The title of your site is important in the factors that Google looks into for your SEO. Because of this, if your title includes both your business name and your city and state, it should show up well in the searches that you need it to show up in the most. This is also a good thing to do because it is so easy. It takes basically no time or effort and can make your Google search result ranking much better in the area where you want to advertise yourself the most. 

You can also look into other local web directories. These are sites that list business information like yelp.com. These are good resources because they are simply another thing that can show your business in the local search results, and they can also have a link to your actual website. As we learned earlier, links like these are the best way to improve your SEO. The more directory sites you put your business information and site links into, the better your local SEO will be just because your name will be more visible in the search results and because of the link building that this does for you. 

Link Building

Let’s look a little closer at these links that we have been talking so much about. In local SEO, the best links are people who refer your business or company on their site. This may be even better if the person referring you is also local and if they happen to have great local SEO. These links are still very powerful to your own SEO. They help your Google search results rankings greatly and direct people to your site from other places on the internet.

Even though you are working on getting local results here, you cannot forget about using the pieces of typical, widespread SEO. You still need to make sure the content of your site is as good as it can possibly be. It needs to be readable and usable so that it is able to be enjoyed by the visitors that come through. It needs to have a good structure and a well-made URL so that Google can read it and those spiders and crawlers can easily access your information. 

Keywords

In local SEO, you also need to remember keywords just as much as you need to do so in regular SEO.

Make sure to use keywords both for describing your business as well as mentioning where you are from so that you are able to show up easily in the Google search results for both of these things. 

You also need to remember that prominence is used in Google’s local SEO decisions. When you have a perfect site with great SEO from every side, you may still be underneath that name brand company in your town that also has locations in every other town. If this happens, do not be discourages. This is simply one of the ways that Google chooses to rank results. If you keep working hard on your local SEO you may pass them up in the results someday.

If not, remember that if people want the best option for the service or product that they need, they will probably look at and compare the top few choices. Because of this, you will likely still get a lot of business even if you lose the number one spot to a chain company location nearby. 

Step By Step Local Seo Guide

After reading through all of these ways to rank high in local search results and the ranking factors of local SEO, you should be able to optimize the SEO of your local business site fairly easily. If you use all of these tips and tricks, we are sure that your local SEO will be in great shape. Next, let’s look into how to get started with local SEO. We already know what to do, but let’s make a step by step game plan so that you can do this in as easy of a process as possible. We are here to help you the best we can! 

1.Look at your title, does it include your city and state? If not, add it. This simple step will help you greatly in your local SEO success. 

2.Make a Google My Business profile. Add and verify the information for your business. Bookmark this page so that you can come back to it to respond to any comments or reviews you happen to receive. 

3.Make a Facebook page. Use this page to display business information, share posts that may interest your intended viewers, and interact with your customers and potential customers. After all, most people are on Facebook today anyway. You may as well use it as a tool to share your business with them. 

4.Add your business to local directory sites. The more times your business shows up in search results, the more times it will be seen. Plus, you can use this as an opportunity to link to your website as well. 

5.Link Build! Ask other local sites and companies to link to your page and consider returning the favor and linking to their page as well. This is the one thing that makes a huge difference in your SEO. 

6.Advertise around your city. If people see posters or billboards with your company name, they are likely to google it and look for your website. 

7.Be friendly. Log back on to your Google My Business and Facebook profiles. 

Interact with the people you are reviewing you in kind and helpful ways. 

8.Make sure your address is listed on your site. 

9.Look at your website. Make sure the content is relevant. See that your site is readable and usable overall. Look at your keyword placement and density. Look back to all of our regular SEO tactics and put them to use as well. 

With these nine tips, you should not only be able to get started with local SEO, but you should be able to excel in this area as well. We hope this information causes your local Google search result rankings to skyrocket and that this leads to more business for your local company as well. 

Citation Building

Now that we know how to use and benefit from local SEO, let’s learn about something called citation building. First, it is important to know and understand that a citation is any type of mention of your business on the internet. These can be mentions of the name of your business, your address, your phone number, or any combination of the three of these pieces of information. A complete citation is called a NAP. NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. When a citation has all of your information because of the NAP, people online can find your business very easily either online or even in person. 

The cool thing about citations is that even if they do not link back to your business’s website, Google stills treats them the same way that they would treat a link. Remember how important links are? Because they are so important, this is a hugely helpful tool in local SEO. The more times your NAP, or really any part of your business, shows upon the internet, the higher it ranks in the Google search result rankings. Some of these citations can even include links to your website. This would make an even more powerful SEO boost for your company site. 

Types of citations in local seo

There are two different types of citations in local SEO. One type of these is called a structured citation. These are from local directory sites like yelp.com that we mentioned earlier in this post. They can also be from sites like Facebook. Unstructured citations are any other types of sites that show your business information but are not necessarily a listing for your company. These could include things like when your business is mentioned and reviewed in a blog and the writer includes your information so that people can try out your business as well.

 Both of these types of citations help to verify your business to google and their search engine results team. It shows that your business is real because it is being mentioned in multiple different places on the internet by many different people. It also adds to your prominence level since you are mentioned more times online overall.One thing that you really need to be careful about when it comes to citations is that your different citations round the web are consistent. They all need to have the correct information, so this should make them each have the same information as well.If the sites have incorrect or different information, this not only confuses your potential clients, but it hurts your local SEO as well. 

Now that we have looked into building citations, how to do it, and why it is helpful, let’s look into building something else. Next we are going to talk about building reviews, how you can build them, and why it is important to do so. 

Reviews Building

As we already know, reviews are comments from people who have used your products or services in real life. They are the honest opinions of your customers. They can be great, horrible, or somewhere in between. Reviews are made so that people know what they are getting before they decide to pay for your product or for your service. 

They ensure that people are getting high quality experiences from what they purchase as well, since if the products or services are bad someone is sure to tell the world about it soon enough.The more good reviews you have, the better you show up in Google’s search results rankings. This is why it is important for you to build up your reviews. Working on building reviews can be a fast way to boost your local SEO. 

How To Boost Reviews

Next, let’s look into how we can boost our reviews. The first way that we can boost reviews is pretty simple. When people visit our business, we can ask them to go online and review their experience with our products or services. If you ask a person to review you, they may actually do it. Of course it never hurts to ask someone for a favor, so this is any easy step that you might as well take to help your SEO improve at the local level.

Another thing that you can do to encourage reviews is to place signs inside your business that encourage people to review their experience online. This eliminates you having to ask every customer for reviews. It also helps customers to notice that a simple review is something that would really help your business in a concrete way.

You could also consider getting the email addresses of your customers when they pay at your business. If you do this, you can send them an email after asking them how their service was and asking them if they could please review you online.You could even provide a link in the email that the customer could click on in order to be brought to a site that they can leave a quick review on.

You could even try offering an incentive for the people that choose to leave a review. You could put their name into a monthly drawing or even give them a coupon for a percentage or a dollar amount off of their next service. 

With these tips, you should be able to continue to get more reviews. The more reviews you get, the better your local SEO looks. Even if asking for reviews is not your favorite thing to do, remember that it is making a huge difference in your SEO. 

Pictures in Local Seo

There are a couple other things that we have not yet mentioned that make a huge difference in local SEO. The first of these two things is photos. When your site includes pictures, people are more likely to notice your business.Pictures are the main thing that is seen on social media today and it’s easy to notice and recognize right away. If you have photos online, people will notice and interact with your content much more than if you did not have photos on your site. Because of this, something as simple as a picture of your storefront can benefit your local SEO in big ways. 

Videos in Local Seo

Videos are the second of these two simple but strong tools. Videos are popular right now and most people like to watch them when they are surfing the web or scrolling through social media. Watching a video takes less effort than reading or researching, so viewers are more likely to learn all about your business in this fashion than they are to click onto your site and read through all of the pages. Because of these factors, videos can really supercharge local SEO. 

Conclusion

In this post, we have learned all about local SEO. We have learned that it is just like SEO but for local searches and we have discussed why it is so important to use it. We have learned the ranking factors for local SEO as well as how to rank high with it. We created a list together of how to start this process, talked through citations, reviews, and even the great benefits of citations and reviews. After reading all of this information, you should be able to have great success with your local SEO.