Local SEO Checklist for a Successful Campaign

Local SEO had a lot in common with the traditional SEO but those days are now over. It is mainly because of the difference in approach towards targeting customers. For instance, proximity to searcher has become the key ranking factor in local SEO.

So, when you see that your business is not showing in the top results when a searcher in your area searches for the types of services you offer, that’s a missed opportunity you wouldn’t want to miss.

With that said, it would be worth mentioning some local SEO tips that you can follow to get extended local web traffic on your business.

How to optimize a website for local SEO

First you need to define the location strategy. Remember, managing more than one franchise at different locations is complicated as compared to managing a single-location business.

Remember, ‘About’ and ‘Contact’ pages are important pages which you wouldn’t want to ignore.

While creating a Contact page, make sure that you are adding complete details regarding name, address and phone number. Make sure that phone numbers you are adding are clickable.

To make it easier for the customers to spot your location, incorporate Google Maps on your Contact page. That will also give you as edge when it comes to optimizing website for SEO.

To ensure that Google identifies your local business, use Schema structured data markup.

Create a page on Google My Business and verify it.

Content of the website

Local SEO is all about links that come from the area where the business is located in. With that said, you need to have impressive content to earn the high quality links. It would be worth mentioning here that if you website does well in search engines locally; it will also get promoted in Google My Business.

So, you need to get high quality backlinks for your website. Below listed are a few steps that you can follow in order to create high quality content.

· Keep in mind the accessibility while creating content for the website.

· Make sure to use localized keywords for optimizing title tags and Meta description.

· The content should show semantic variations with the changes in keywords in order to assure visitors and search engines that no part of content is conflicting with the other part.

· Use photos and videos to elaborate the details about business and services.

· Make sure that content is original.

· If there are duplicate listings existing on your website, remove them. It can be done with the help of free tools available online.

Citations

Citations are highly important when it comes to local SEO. It basically involves providing references to your business on other highly accessible popular website. A typical citation mainly includes details about name, address, phone number and the business website.

· You can add citations manually or in an automatic manner. Manual citations are good because you can control those citations; but they can be hard to manage when you are required to modify the business details. So, if you want to save your time while managing citations, you can use automatic way of creating them.

Third party local citations and listings are more powerful because those parties usually have reputation. There could be some moderation involved in the creation of such listings and citations, but you will have a better chance at promoting your business locally when you are listed in those third party websites.