Local SEO!!!
Isn’t that something which is completely relevant to your business but left aside? First, let me be clear that We will not discuss any sort of checklist today (That is for Saturdays, right?). Here you will get a complete Local SEO 101 Guide.
Why Is This Local SEO Stuff Important Anyways?
Local SEO strategies help you to boost your website for the local searches. The real deals, the real persons for whom you created your website. If your brick and mortar business is in Melbourne, there is no point in showing up in the search results of Sydney.
With the right approach, you can improve your local SEO rankings which will help you materialise the real audience of your business. In this guide, you will learn some obvious practices and some new ones too.
So, are you ready to rumble for your local audience? Then, “It’s Time!!!”, let’s get you started
Local SEO 101
The first one coming out for you is,
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Focusing On Title & Meta Description
First, what are title and meta description? (there is a reason I called this guide as 101) Title and Meta description tags are HTML elements which can help you in the content customization of your web page. These elements contain information about the content of your web page that will appear in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Think of these elements as micro-ad for your website.
With the recent update of Google, the character limit of meta description raised from 160 characters to 320 characters. This means you have more space now to convince the user to visit your website.
Optimum usage of keywords and LSI keywords can really help you to boost your local rankings and traffic as well. Allow me to give you some tips that can help you in strategizing your meta titles and descriptions. Make every word count and follow my lead here,
Don’t waste the precious space in the name of the page which doesn’t have any helpful information.
As you want to reach the local audience, you must go for keywords with your city. Like we are SEO services in Sydney, we mention that in our meta title and description to make it relevant for our local visitors
Focus on only one targeted keyword and try to push it in the starting of the tag.
If you really want to sound relevant to your local audience, you must take charge at this very moment and create stunning meta titles and description to get loads of relevant local audience on your website.
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Citations & Online Directories Still Ranks You Up
There are many online local business directories such as Citysearch, Merchant Circle, Yelp and others. Make use of these online directories and get your business listed correctly. A fine tip was given by Sherry Bonelli in Search Engine Land, “Check with your local newspaper’s website and your Chamber of Commerce to see if they have a local business directory you can get listed on. You can also do a search for keywords like “[your city] directory” to find other local citation sites or directories”.
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Google My Business Can Come In Handy
The process is quite simple. You need to visit google.com/business. Then for verification purposes, Google will send you a postcard with a PIN number to your physical business address. Then, all you need to do is log in to your account and use that PIN to verify your business.
You cannot skip this part because Google always confirms that the physical address of your business is legitimate or not. In order to optimise your GMB page, you need a clear information with a solid description about your business, relevant categories, business hours (Must Match your business rosters), type of payment your business accept and info like that.
You can also upload photos and logos of your business to make it more relevant.
Make sure that you didn’t leave any of the detail to complete the listing procedure. If your business doesn’t have a place where your customers can visit then you can hide your physical address.
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Online Review Gives You Authority
This expresses a lot about online reviews. You can make use of tools that can help you in not only recording the feedbacks but also aid you in tracking and managing them. Some of the tools are,
Reputation Loop
Get Five Stars
Trust Pilot
Vendasta
Google also stated that “high-quality, positive reviews from your customers will improve your business’s visibility”. This makes it quite clear that you need to offer an opportunity to your customer to give a review of your service or product. This will not only boost your local SEO rankings but also urge your potential customer to reach you for business.
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Schema Markup Boost Your Local Ranking
It will be good to hear that Google wants you to add schema markup for your website as it makes easy for the spider to decide what is in your content. So, use schema markup and rank for your relevant customers.
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Google Lens Is The Future
In the words of Sundar Pichai, Google Lens is “a set of vision-based computing capabilities that can understand what you’re looking at and help you take action.”
So, sooner or later you need to get ready for a revolutionary technology coming your way.
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Voice Search Queries Will Increase Your Visibility
Over To You
So, now you know how you can optimise your website for the local audience. If being a local leader is your priority, you take this necessary path which will lead you and your business to greater heights. Let’s have a look again at the pointers we discussed above for your convenience. Title and Meta description tags are HTML elements which can help you in customising the content of your web page. These elements contain the content of your web page that will appear in the search engine result pages (SERPs). As a small company, you must enlist your business on at least on one local business listing site. If you don’t do that, you will definitely lose a large chunk of local audience. Google My Business commonly known as GMB is a directory. But it is one of the biggest directories in the digital soil. Your business must have a Google My Business page if you want to penetrate your local market. Online reviews have a great impact on a business’s authority level. Google wants you to add schema markup for your website as it makes easy for the spider to decide what is in your content. So, use schema markup and rank for your relevant customers. Visual searches are speeding up and by the time it presses on the full throttle, you need to buckle up. You can find a number of people who prefer images over the text. This gives food for thought and Google developers cooked “Google Lens” a visual search engine. By 2020, over 50% of queries will be voice searches. The important aspect is that voice queries are different from normal queries. They mimic how real people talk. I hope that you like this post. Keep these courses of action close while strategizing for your local audience and you will get the favourable results. Good Luck in your future endeavourReference
moz.com/blog/category/local-seo recode.net/2016/6/1/11829844/mary-meeker-voice-image-searches-2020
