10 Simple Tips for using a local SEO to Get Ahead Your Competition

What is A Local SEO?

Running a business all by oneself is a very hard task. You may be satisfied with your loyal customers who purchase from you regularly, but you should eye for more new customers if you want your brand to be known among others and gain popularity. Keeping your Website and your SEO up to date can be hard work too. Sometimes you need to hire a professional search engine optimization agency which helps you in ranking your website.  It may occur in your mind that improving your website or updating the SEO may either be difficult or very expensive.

Local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a helpful way to promote your local business online. When a consumer wants to buy a product or service they go online, specifically to say, take the help of Google, to find the best options for their needs, and many want that option to be local and readily available to them. You can advertise your services and products to your local customers, who live within same city as yours at the time when they are looking for the product online. The practice of Standard SEO is much different from Local SEO.

According to Google, 46% of the online product searches have a ‘local intent’. Whenever someone searches for a product or a service online, the SEO automatically tracks the intent of the customer and further reduces it to local boundaries. Searches which typically includes a location or ‘near me’ keyword, go to the territory of local search engine results page (SERP).

You may notice that the local search engine results are much more different from the standard results and include many criteria like opening times, reviews and ratings and even in some cases, photographs are also provided. Everything that’s displayed in the local pack comes from your business’ ‘Google My Business’ profile, a critical part of Local SEO.

How to use a Local SEO?

1. Get an orderly Title and Description of your Business:

You get a brief space for propagating the marketing message of your brand. You have to use it wisely by adding a Title and Description, banishing generic words and terms that have nothing to do with your business and get the best first impression among your potential customers. In that way, your company can head to the top of the search list when anyone searches with local intent. You should also research the keywords that will help you gain top position on any search engine.

2. Get on Google My Business:

Google My Business or GMB is just like an online directory, which contains the name and details about many companies. It is important that your brand or company gets a section of its own. It is simple to register your business to ‘Google My Business’ with a verification process of your company at first, to ensure that you are the legitimate owner of the company. Then you get established in the directory and you can add your Business description, categories of service, hours that your business remains open and other important information. Your Google My Business Profile may contain important information which you can submit by yourself.

3. Get Online Reviews:

In order to establish a believable identity to your customers, you need some online reviews for your company. You should ask people who are satisfied with your business to post a review online so that others can see them and engage with you further. This process will help you flourish more. It may be noted that most of the Google My Business Attributes, Questions and Answers, and Online reviews are posted by the customers. So you need to communicate with your customers in order to give them a better experience of your business. Insist your customers to give genuine reviews on your business’ Social media profile like Google+ and others.

Sometimes your business gets some bad reviews by costumers. Which brings down your online reputation. So you should know how to handle negative comments on your content or business in a positive way to maintain your business reputation and client base.

4. Get Backlinks From Non-Competing Local Business:

You should look for getting some backlinks from the websites of other local businesses. You must approach your non-competing business owner with an offer of exchanging backlinks- you will provide a backlink to the other business, and the owner of the other business will provide you with another backlink. In this way, both businesses will flourish online.

5. Gain Local Coverage:

To keep your business at the top of the search page you should..' instead you should collaborate with local journalists and reporters and give them a chance to take your interview. You should talk about something new and open a path of opportunities to your customers. In this process, the local coverage on the websites will gain your business with more backlinks- meaning that your business is slowly becoming popular to the masses. You may also search for bloggers who may write about your company in their blogs. You can use searches in Google like ‘your location blogs’ for that. You can also take the help of social media in order to make your brand’s name known across your locality. All these will offer you with positive results in the future.

6. Provide Citations:

If you want to make your name known across the cyberspace and put your brand’s name at the top of the search engine, you should do that with citations. The list of your name, address, phone number should be mentioned in order to aggregate business data. You can take the help of tools like Yext and Moz Local. Provide Citations in as many websites and listings as possible. It will prove beneficial for you as your business will get locally listed. The citations are particularly important to get in place for a local SEO.

Two types of citations are there: Structured and unstructured. The structured citations appear in business listings and come from fields being filled when the listing is claimed. Unstructured citations generally come from the backlinks you get from social media and other web media coverage.

7. Provide Link to Other Web Pages:

When you furnish your details in Google My Business list, you should give the opportunity to add links to the ‘about’ section of the website. You should link the inner pages of your business website in the section. It will be good for you if you are offering a portfolio of products and services of your business. Remember to be consistent and keep this information in all of the social media profiles and websites of your business. Many sites only have their important pages linked to the main menu navigation either on the homepage or in the footer, but you should be adding relevant internal links within your pages’ content as well, including blog posts and service pages. After improving your site’s internal linking structure, your business is sure to rank better on Google.

8. Sponsor Local Meetups:

You should try to sponsor a local meet up in order to gain credibility and a sense of trust among your potential customers. You can use Meetup.com, a site which brings people together with common interests. If you wish to sponsor any local meet up in the Meetup.com website, you will get backlinks which will help you with the local SEO.

9. Make sure your Site Loads Quickly:

You must always keep an eye on the technical factors about your website. A lot of people use mobile devices while performing a local search because the mobile devices are either location aware or the customers are looking for a company which is nearer to them. Everybody cannot get access to a Wi-Fi router, many keep connected to 3G and 4G Connections as well. That is why your site’s speed must be fast enough to open on time. You can visit many websites and download software that performs data test on your website.

10. Check For the appearance of your site on a mobile device:

Your website should be responsive, that is to say, it should not be user-hostile in a mobile device and should load easily. You can hire a professional deliver in order to take care of your website’s appearance on a mobile device. You can also perform the Google Mobile-Friendly Test in order to see whether your business website is responsive or not.

Final Say:

These are some of the tips and suggestions that you may follow during your local SEO in order to take your business to the top. Otherwise, you could end up in losing market share to your competitors. This is the reason primarily why so many SEO agencies and consultants specialize in local SEO rather than universal SEO. Your goals get different when you opt for Local SEO, and it helps in maintaining high visibility of your business to your potential customers. Also, through researching and adding important keywords while performing local SEO will be better. You should not only think about the technical part but stress on the content of your website as well. The more content you will add, your customers will get more informed on your business like valuable advice, entertainment value, and others.