8 Local SEO tips that will make you dominate the SERPs

Ranking first in today’s ever-competitive is quite a hard job.

Follow these local SEO tactics.

1. Optimize Your Google My Business Profile

Is your Google My Business profile well-optimized for your customers? Regardless of your niche or industry, it’s important to craft a GMB profile that your ideal customers can relate to.

Stay away from these harmful doings.

If you ignore this important tip, you’ll miss out on a great opportunity to bring your products and services to the spotlight.

Worse, your customers will likely not find you in the Google map packs or local search results.

Add all of the important information about your business when optimizing your Google My Business profile, including photos, menu items, service lines, etc.

When optimizing for Google My Business, remember to fill in all the essential information, including photos, menu items, and service lines.

Above all, make sure your business is listed in the right categories. If you’re a Pizzeria, for example, then you should (of necessity) add your business to restaurants and eateries. This is such an important aspect of your local search optimization. So, you should take this smart step and fill in the menu information, and more. Make sure your information is always up to date

If I search, if I search “Thai food near me” and a restaurant with good and many reviews shows up in the search as “open,” but I found it closed when I drove to the place, isn’t that a bad user experience? Of course, it is!

As a customer, I might not be interested in checking out the restaurant in the future, even if it reopens. That’s exactly how consumers all around the world behave.

So if your business isn’t going to be open at certain periods, make sure you update your Google My Business page with this information. You want to be clear to potential customers that your business is temporarily closed.

2. Research Local Keywords for Your Business

Local keyword research for your local SEO optimization

Keyword research for local SEO optimization is not the same as keyword research for blog posts. Here it’s kind of done and forget job. That means you don’t need to find new keywords all the time. In most cases, all you need to get started is a short list of keywords that people use to find your local business.

Keyword research for local SEO is typically simpler and more straightforward than non-local keyword research.

While some locations and cities are more competitive than others, there’s generally a much smaller competitor pool for local keywords relative to the pool for keywords that aren’t bound by geography.

Now let us show you how you can find the local keywords for your business.

2.1- Google Suggest

Yes, Google Suggest can massively help you to find your local keyword. Regardless to say it’s completely free to use. So, use this free service to extract your keywords. Here is an example of how you can find local keywords effortlessly using Google Suggest.

Suppose you have a coffee shop in Singapore and you need local keywords for your coffee shop. Go to Google and type coffee shop on the search box. Then press the space button and you will get a set of keywords that you can choose for your coffee shop.

2.2- Keyword Generator Tool or Service

There are free web tools to find out the local keywords for your business. Just Google “local keyword generator” and you’ll find quite a few tools.

Here we are using one of the free local keywords generators. Go to this site and choose your business type. Then enter your location name and click the GENERATE KEYWORDS button.

local keyword generator tool

Then it will generate a set of local keywords for you. You can use these local keywords for optimizing your business for local SEO.

You can download this file as a CSV file for further use.

2.3- Yelp Suggest

Yelp works like Google Suggest. First, you need to create an account on Yelp.

Enter your Business Name, Address, Category, Phone Number, Website Address (if any), and Email ID to create your Yelp account.

create a Yelp account

After creating your Yelp account, type a keyword that someone in your area might use to find your business.

It will show you a list of the results. These are your competitors as well. So, check all the keywords from this list and use these keywords to optimize your local business.

3. Manage Your Online Reputation

Your online reputation is very important when it comes to local search optimization. Yes, positive reviews, star ratings, customer testimonials, and overall good customer experience will go a long way in helping you rank higher in the local map pack.

A good online reputation doesn’t mean you’ll only get positive reviews. It also means that you address every negative comment from customers without getting pissed off.

If I wanted to hire a plumber to help out with some bathroom faucet repairs and saw 10 four-star reviews and 4 unanswered 1-star reviews, I might reconsider hiring this plumber.

Bad reviews are mostly reviews that the business or marketer didn’t take the time to respond to.

Keep in mind that prospects and customers have a right to give feedback, however, you have to respond to them to appreciate their feedback and clear the air (suppose they mentioned some erroneous things about your products)

You should keep your ear to the ground. Monitor and respond to customer reviews, whether good or bad. Ideally, encourage natural and unsolicited reviews, and remember to add first-party reviews to your local business website.

4. Get Regular Reviews from Happy Customers

It’s important to encourage your happy customers to write reviews; sharing their experiences with your products and services.

These reviews will help to improve your Google My Business presence, and also motivate more local buyers to choose your business.

According to a survey by BrightLocal, 85% of customers believe online reviews as much as personal recommendations. If you want your customers to leave helpful reviews, here are simple ways to encourage them:

Nudge your customer to write a review after they have purchased your product.

Utilize an internal survey to pinpoint satisfied customers, then send them a post-purchase email asking them to write a review.

Respond to your customers’ reviews. Appreciate reviewers and address complaints.

Note: Although Yelp actively discourages asking customers for reviews, Google says it’s okay.

5. Optimize On-page SEO for Your Local Business

On-page SEO is one of the most crucial local business SEO tips. It helps you to get better rankings for the local keywords that your target audience is looking for. There are a few major things that you’ll want to make sure of while optimizing your on-page SEO. Let’s focus on those major things.

5.1- Create High Quality and Long Content

Content is the main powerhouse for on-page SEO. It needs to be high quality so that it can serve the people who are looking for the solution of their specific problem. The first step to creating high-quality content is choosing relevant keywords and topics.

Once you’re done with the keyword research, start writing the content and make sure it’s long enough to convince Google that you’ve offered more information than your competitors. It should be an average of 2000 words per article.

Before you decide on the optimum length for your content, Google your primary keyword and visit the top 10 results in the SERPs. Are some of those pages longer than 2200 words? Then yours should be, too.

Break your text into short sentences when writing and insert images to break paragraphs into sessions. If your content is always the same, with huge blocks of text and nothing to relieve this visual distress, it may be discouraging for your audience.

Consequently, it will give you a higher bounce rate and reduce the time your users spend on your site, which means fewer opportunities for converting your visitors into customers.

5.2- Create More Local NAPs for Your Local Business

We have already discussed what is NAP, how to run a NAP audit, and how to create more NAP citations for a local business. See that section to get your job done.

5.3- Optimize the Title, URL, and Meta Description

optimize the Title, URL, and Meta Description for on-page SEO

In order to show your website in search engine results pages (SERPs), Google has to know what your page is about. Using specific keywords in the title tag of each page makes it easier for search engine crawlers to understand your website.

To ensure your site pages rank for the proper intent, be sure to include the focus keyword for each page in the title. Incorporate your keyword as naturally as possible. Then add your site name or company name with a separator sign after the title.

And keep your title under 70 characters, any longer and your title will be cut off in search results. Mobile search results show up to 78 characters. So try to follow this rule while creating any of your page titles.

Your page URLs should be simple to digest for both readers and search engines. They are also important when keeping your site hierarchy consistent as you create subpages, blog posts, and other types of internal pages.

Don’t forget to remove the extra and unnecessary words from your URLs to get a better result. And use only one or two keywords in each of your URLs.

A meta description doesn’t influence your on-page optimization directly. It’s a feature that helps users, however, learn more about your page. The fact that Google will bold user search terms that appear in your meta description is another reason to optimize your meta description for on-page SEO.

Include your core and related keywords in your meta description for the best results. For the best results, your meta description should stick to 160 characters.

5.4- Include Clear Calls To Action

Not only do you want people to visit your website, but you also want them to convert! Make sure that your phone number is clearly and prominently displayed and there are easy ways to contact you. Guide the user and use CTAs to tell them what to do next like call you, contact you, or ask you about any specific product or service.

5.5- Internal and External Linking

Ensure Internal and external linking as local SEO tips

Linking is very crucial for on-page SEO optimization. You may have heard that internal linking doesn’t have that much impact on ranking. But the truth is internal is also a ranking factor for search engines.

For internal linking, you can use any of your website’s pages or blogs to link. However, don’t link any irrelevant content just for increasing the number of links. For example, if your content is about “Dog food”, don’t link to some content that is about sports.

Another tip for internal linking is to take at least 3 words as anchor text. Your anchor text should be self-explanatory. So that your readers can guess the content you have linked.

For external linking, try to link to some high authority website. To understand if it’s a high authority website, check that site’s Domain Authority, average monthly visitors, and the number of backlinks. Don’t make every external link do-follow links, try to make it no-follow if it’s your competitor.

5.6- Image Alt-text

Alt-text is like SEO for your images. It tells Google and other search engines what your images are about.

Every day hundreds of thousands of images are being uploaded to Google, so without an alt-text, it’s tough to determine for Google what’s your image is about. Hence, Google doesn’t rank images without alt-texts.

Here’s what to keep in mind when adding image alt-text:

• Smartly blend your main keyword with the image alt-text, if not possible, use LSI keywords for your main keywords. And don’t go for keyword stuffing.
• Make it descriptive and specific.
• Keep it shorter than 125 characters.
• Last but not least don’t upload any image without optimization. There are free image optimization web tools like tinypng for optimizing your images effortlessly.

5.6- Increase Page Speed

Increase page speed as local SEO tips

Page speed determines how fast your page content loads.

As per the research, 50% of users will abandon a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load. People want information, and they want it now!

To increase the page speed of your site, you can follow these steps;

• Choose a Quality Web Hosting
• Keep Your Site Up to Date
• Choose a Speed Optimized Theme
• Optimize Your Database
• Decrease Server Requests
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Enable Gzip Compression
• Minify CSS and JS Files
• Deactivate Unused Plugins
• If you are not sure where from you should measure your site speed, you can use any of the below-mentioned free web tools to get your job done.

5.7- Make It Responsive (Mobile Friendly)

Google started favoring sites that are optimized for faster mobile speeds, even for desktop searches. Mobile responsiveness matters. Also, it’s a ranking factor for Google.

If you’re not sure about your own site’s mobile readiness, use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

If your website isn’t mobile-friendly yet, you should consider a website re-design or updating your WordPress theme.

5.8- Add Schema Markup to Your Pages

Schema markup is a part of technical SEO. However, it’s important for on-page SEO as well. It is the key behind those featured snippets, knowledge panels, and other content features you see when you search for something on Google.

There are hundreds of different types of Schema markups. The right ones for your business will depend on what information is most critical to your customers.

If most of your customers call you, then you will want to use the telephone markup. Other popular markups for local businesses include:

• Opening hours
• Currencies accepted
• Price range
• Address
• Aggregate rating
• Area served
• Logo
• Reviews

The most manual process is to use the coding from Schema.org and adjust it to fit your site. Navigate to Schema.org, which offers a complete listing of all the markups available. Head to their list of markups here, then select the Schema you want to use.

The simplest method to add Schema markup to your site is to use a plugin. It will automatically add markup in the JSON-LD format. It requires very little work, which is ideal for site owners who don’t have coding knowledge or the time to mess with code.

add schema markup using a markup generator plugin

After installing and configuring the plugin, you’ll see the Schema option on your left sidebar. Click here to generate and add schema markup for your website.

5.9- Embed a Google Map

Each location landing page should have an embedded Google Map based on the business address. Embedded maps can be easily re-sized to fit around copy on the page and not only does this provide a good user experience, but it also provides Google with vital local-based information about your organization.

When setting up this feature, make sure that your address matches that of your Google Business Profile listing. Hope that this article was helpful.