Local SEO has lately been the hot topic for Google, for obvious reasons – customers are actively looking for physical solutions to their problems. Businesses have started to realise that Local SEO is a great investment for them, as it helps businesses operate efficiently on a regional scale, as opposed to a national level.
Optimising local SEO will help businesses in increasing website traffic, leads, and conversions as their strategies are more relevant to their local customer base. Think of this focused strategy as a way to more effectively compete with larger domestic brands with unlimited resources.
Why is local SEO important for businesses?
A local search is someone looking for businesses, products, services, or additional information related to a particular location. You can search for “concerts near me” to find concerts in your city, or “best painting services in [location]” to find painting services near you.
Local SEO is very important because it helps you:
- Increase your online visibility
- Bring more walk-in customers to your stationary location
- Attract more targeted traffic and increase your chances of conversion
- Increase credibility and build trust
Tips to make local SEO success for your business
Here are a few tips that will help your business grow with local SEO:
- Optimising your homepage
The homepage of your website is the first page that a customer visits. Hence, it should be well-optimised. Your homepage should clearly show who you are, where you are and what you do. Make it easy for Google to understand these elements of your business. Page title tags, header tags, and meta descriptions should clearly state this information.
- Focus on voice search
Voice search will grow significantly over the next few years. Therefore, local SEO needs to optimise how users ask questions when they speak to their device, not how they type their search queries. Customers use more long-tail keywords in voice search than in regular search. Because of this, she also needs to adjust her SEO of the content to match the talkative tone of the speaker.
- Use local phrases in your content
While local keyword research is essential in planning your content, it’s even more important to understand how the topics that guide those keyword phrases align with your content. Sprinkling the content on your websites with local mentions can help your business find success with local SEO content.
- Create a page for every service and product
Applying the product/service schema to each product/service offering requires its page. So, not only is this a general SEO best practice, but it also helps create a clearer sitemap for search engines and helps rank your product/service pages for specific offers. . It also opens the door to specific schema applications.
- Using schema markup
The richer and more interactive Google search results become, the more important the schema becomes. Schemas help algorithms understand how content relates to each other. Add schema markup to local businesses, authors, etc. to highlight your expertise and authority.
How to plan content for local SEO?
Content is the foundation of digital marketing success, regardless of which channel that content appears on. Content determines the business your social media fans and followers connect with, how visitors interact with your site and the keywords that search engines consider relevant to your site.
Hence, you must plan your content well for local SEO. Here are a few tips that you must follow while planning the content for your local SEO strategy:
- Use Google Trends to research keywords
- Understand the questions that customers ask you
- Include case studies about your previous projects
- Add customer reviews to your website in the form of testimonials
- Mention the uniqueness of your service
Conclusion
SEO changes quickly. We don’t know when Google will introduce new features to its SERP for local search, but we do not doubt that these changes will happen. That’s why it’s important to always keep track of your local SEO. Businesses and companies can look for the best SEO service providers that can help them in providing SEO-related services as well.