There are a lot of features one has to think about when opting their site for Local SEO. Unlike the classic one that we all know of, Local SEO takes your business into a smaller but much more specific scale of online exposure - in your local area to be more precise.
There are similarities, however there are also differences. Below are some of the important factors that you need to know about in regards to Local SEO.
1. Location of Business
Where your business is geographically located is one of the most important aspects of your Local SEO. Preferably, it should be near a city because of Google’s centroid bias - the nearer a business is in the center of a city, the bigger the chances of it showing up on the local search for that particular place.
Your business could potentially come out of the searches even if the user doesn't specify an address - Google can track where they’re doing the search and it will suggest the nearest available places to the user. However, these can only be achieved if you have properly supplied Google with your business’ specific address via its Google+ Local page.
2. Putting Your Address on Your Site and NAP
Your site needs to be opted for Local SEO as well. The first thing you can do is to put your local address of your business to your domain name. You will also need to put it on your site’s Title and Description tags. And then you can start putting NAP on your site pages. NAP stands for your business Name, Address, and Phone number.
Your NAP has to be placed in that exact order, at ALL times. put it in a conspicuous area in your homepage as well as on the other pages of your site.
3. Citations on Authoritative Local Directories
Now this is where you get to use your NAP - by having online directories catalogue them. These are called citations and you need them to increase your standing in the local listings. There are a bunch of online local directories out there. First start from the most credible ones like Google, Yahoo and Bing and then go from there.
A precaution when doing your citations - always be consistent with your NAP. Failure in doing so could result in Google showing wrong information regarding your business (e.g it’s location, name or phone number)
4. Link Building
One of the major points where classic SEO and Local SEO converge is Link Building. In Local SEO you’ll need to do a lot of organic inbound links from credible sites. There are ways that you can earn them. You can hold local events and invite bloggers near your area - you can also hold free giveaway events.
There are a lot to mention but in a nutshell, the best way to gain local inbound links is to open up to everyone in your local area. Build a good relationship with everyone by providing them with great services and offers, and they will hopefully link back to you and talk about you to their friends..
5. Client Reviews
To see how useful the service you’re providing to everyone is, you need to provide them a space where they could comment or review on it. Sometimes those spaces are provided for you (like in your Google+ Places for instance). These are important as it’ll let you see how transparent your services are to them - of course you need to reply to these reviews no matter how negative they may be.
Another precaution - never put in fake reviews. You need to earn them the honest and hard-earned way. Using a shortcut method like that could end up having your site penalized by Google. If you’re faking a review in a 3rd party site, then your business might end up being completely removed from their database.
6. Social Media Promotion
Let’s admit to a single truth about our business - we want it to get its needed exposure. We want everyone to notice it. Aside from doing what Google wants us to do, we can also use the power of the social media to boost its popularity. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and more - these social networking sites can easily share your business to everyone.
Make sure to provide complete information to your business’ Facebook page - do that for your other social media accounts too. This will save the users time to find info about your company as they won’t need to go to another site to find said information. You can use these social networks to post your latest updates regarding your site, products, services and more.
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If you’ve been building your site for quite sometime and it still doesn’t show up on the Google search pages for relevant searches, then you sir, badly need to opt your site for SEO. Depending on your business range, there are two types of SEO strategies that you can employ - the classic SEO and Local SEO. Now, you only need to use SEO if you want your site to rank on global searches. But if you want to rank your site high up in searches done in your local area, then pick Local SEO - this one is much preferable for small businesses as you get less competition for relevant keyword searches.
