The Beginner’s Guide to Local SEO

Local search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspects of SEO strategy. For many businesses, the local community makes up most or all of their customer base. But even for larger businesses with multiple locations, local SEO is a powerful tool to help your ideal audience find you faster and easier by bringing you to the top of their search results.

In fact, local SEO is one of the best places to get started if you’re new to SEO, because it’s often much easier to achieve high search results ranking for localized queries rather than general queries. Here are the basics you need to get started:

Related: 12 Local SEO Tips From SEO Agency Founders

Start with best practices to optimize your website

Local SEO begins with the same best practices that any type of SEO uses. Before you move on to more specific strategies, make sure you’re already doing the following well:

• Your website has been set up to follow technical SEO rules so it’s functioning well and doesn’t have any issues that would cause it to be penalized by Google’s algorithm.

• Your website is designed for both mobile and desktop users to engage with easily and loads quickly with alt text on all images and those images optimized for website performance.

• You publish valuable and interesting content and optimize it with keywords that you’ve researched, as well as title tags and meta descriptions.

• You’re effectively using internal links.

• You use analytics tools to track your website traffic and make adjustments based on that data.

Understand your market

If you’re a local business, understanding your market requires you to know your local community as well as your competitors. Research in this stage is particularly important for businesses that have multiple locations and may not have a strong understanding of how the market differs in each location.

Analyze your competitors in order to understand what they’re doing well and where you see room for improvements. Both of these serve as valuable information you can use to improve upon what they’re doing. Start by seeing where they pop up in local search queries and visiting their websites. Do they have particular pages that perform well in the search results? If so, can you create a page that’s even better than theirs?

Next, look them up on Google Maps and view their ratings and reviews — what do people say they love about the business, and what complaints do they have?

Whatever you discover, good or bad, look for ways you can improve upon it for your own website and your customer experience as a whole. While you’re bound to find ways you can improve your website, you may also find some tips about how to beat your competitors offline as well, which will ultimately come back around to benefit your website in the form of improved reviews, repeat customers, referrals and increased traffic.

Related: Struggling to Attract Local Customers to Your Business? Use These Digital Marketing Strategies to Increase Your Visibility.

Make sure you’re set up to be seen locally

Google Maps and other local directories are one of the primary ways customers find businesses in their area. It’s important to build a strong brand that addresses client-centered marketing strategies. While it may seem obvious that you want to be on Google Maps, you’d be surprised how many businesses haven’t set up their Google Business Profile properly. In some cases, someone else may even have set it up for them!

Here’s a quick guide:

• If you haven’t set up Google Maps for your business, someone else may already have done so. Don’t worry if they have — you’ll just need to claim your business.

• Once you have your Google My Business profile set up, fill it out in full. Include your website, phone number, business hours and photos of your business. The more complete it is, the better. Don’t forget to keep it up to date! This information directly interacts with Google’s algorithm and will boost your website.

• Ask customers to leave a positive review for you on Google Maps. And for any reviews you receive, be sure to respond. Thank people for positive reviews, and respond politely and respectfully to negative reviews with an offer to fix any problems. Do not argue with or insult negative reviewers, as it will reflect badly on you — prospective customers are more likely to identify with other customers and not with your business.

Once you’ve gotten set up on Google Maps, you’ll be able to make use of the Google My Business’s insights dashboard in order to analyze data about your leads. This can give you important information to help you focus your SEO efforts for better results, such as which search queries led to your pages and where website traffic came from.

Publish local content

One of the best ways to optimize your website for local SEO is simply to publish content that’s relevant to your community using localized keywords. The more often you publish content related to a specific location, the more Google’s algorithm will associate your business with that location. It’s also often easier to rank for location-specific topics than for topics that aren’t tied to any location.

One of my favorite ways to create local content is by engaging with my local community and posting about it. You can highlight businesses and events in your area, and if you attend any of those events, write or make a video about it! This strategy can go far in creating a strong reputation in your community.

Reach your community through offsite SEO

In addition to publishing content about local topics, there’s a significant amount you can do to boost your SEO by engaging with your community off of your website. This could include link-building with other businesses, publishing articles in a local publication and even getting offline and engaging with the community directly in order to build relationships and your reputation.

Related: 4 Strategies to Help You Attract More Local Customers to Your Small Business

Never stop learning more about SEO

Search engine optimization is a constantly changing practice, and even those of us who are experts need to continue learning to stay up to date on best practices. Luckily, there are many resources available to keep learning. Watch recently published YouTube instructional videos about SEO, and read recently published books about how to create effective SEO strategies written by SEO experts.

Ultimately, the best way to learn is to create your strategy, document the results and then simply learn through experience. The more you experiment, the more you’ll learn. Just keep trying — remember, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.