7 Local SEO Tips and Tricks

Local SEO is very essential to businesses or brands with location-based services or products. It helps brands become more visible to the target audience within the locale of the business. Local SEO can do so much more for many local businesses than just helping them rank well on search engines, although this is essential in this digital era. It can really help brands boost their sales by directing organic traffic (people who are within that locale and in need of that particular service) to the brand’s website.

Local SEO can also help local brands save more on the cost of marketing since the strength of their SEO will be doing more of the work for them. Then they can spend very little to almost nothing on paid marketing. Rather than competing with other brands in the same industry who appeal to a larger audience within various locations than yours, you can focus more of your energy and resources by focusing on dominating the locale of the business.

If you’re seriously considering leveraging the power of local SEO for your brand, it would be a smart move to contact an SEO marketing agency for assistance. Now let’s consider these 7 local SEO tips and tricks you can start using today to get results.

1. Make use of local listings

There are quite a lot of websites that offer free listings for location-based services. Take advantage of these listings and push out all relevant details about the brand on it, including all contact details as well as service days and hours. These sites are very useful to boost the brand’s local SEO and ensuring that the target audience of the brand can easily find them. If there are a lot of listed services in the industry where the brand is, consider paying to push your brand’s listing to the top of the service listing website (if they have such services).

2. Use Google My Business

Google is one very popular search engine that most businesses struggle to get good ranking on. And what better way to rank high on Google than using their business listing and verification product which allows anyone with a physical store address to register their business on Google. It is very easy to use, set up and verify – all at no cost. Ensure that you enter all required information correctly. If for any reason, the physical address of the business changes, (or any other important contact information) ensure that you update it.

3. Get reviews on Facebook

Open a Facebook page for your business and set it up (put all necessary information on the page: website, contact number, and address). Share your Facebook page with your customer to like it and give reviews about your services or products. Facebook is a really strong social media platform that search engines like to pull relevant information about brands or business, especially the ones with good engagement and relevant information. Oftentimes, when people search for information about the brand on search engines search engines can pull the page URL and display it on the first page of the search engine, at least. This is only the case if there are a lot of reviews on the page and the engagement level of the page is decent.

4. Make use of long tail keywords to create content on the website

If you’re not already blogging on the website of the brand, then you should consider creating a blog on it. It is one great way to boost the SEO and local SEO of the website. Making use of long tail keywords will give you the opportunity to create the kind of content that will help your target audience find you faster. In addition to that, it will also help your brand rank very well for voice-based search queries. There has been a remarkable increase in the use of various voice search tools, including home assistants. One of the interesting things about this new trend is that long tail keywords often get ranked higher for voice search queries. To create more user-relevant long tail keywords, try providing very detailed answers to questions your target audience often ask, and push it out on the blog.

5. Ensure your website is responsive and mobile friendly

This is a major SEO strategy that you cannot negotiate with. You simply can’t. The reason being that the world has almost been taken over by mobile phone users. In fact, quite a lot of the search queries on most search engines are done through mobile devices. We live in a very fast-paced world, where people are always looking for information at the snap of their fingers. So it is more than important that for your brand’s website to rank well on search engine results page (SERP). The website also has to be very responsive to mobile devices as well as very friendly to these devices too. This means the website speed also has to be very fast. There really is no use visiting a website that opens very slow, even if it has the richest and most relevant information.

6. Maximize the ‘About Us’ page of the website

The ‘About Us’ page of the website where you tell visitors what the brand is about should be properly optimized. Don’t just stop at describing the mission and vision of the brand. Go beyond that to putting other relevant information like contact numbers, contact address and Google Maps. If you have registered on Google My Business, it would be a lot easier to display the map of where your business is on this page – including the opening and closing hours. You can also talk about the environment where the business is and mention major to minor landmarks near the location of the business.

7. Make use of meta descriptions

This SEO strategy will never go out of style, so make sure you’re using it to boost the local SEO of the brand. It allows you to very a shorter description of the content on the URL. This is what search engines show when displaying URL content in the snippet area of the search query results. You can install an SEO plugin that will help you manually edit these meta descriptions (ensure you also put relevant keywords) with ease.