Top 11 Strategic Local SEO Tips To Boost Ranking Higher

Local SEO Checklist has become a powerful way for local businesses to improve visibility on search engines. 42% of the local searches involve clicks on the Google Map pack. Local SEO relies on the strategy to win local customers who are searching for a solution in the area.

If you don’t know how to do local SEO, or you are looking for a Local SEO Checklist to optimize your brand presence on Google business, and reach out to the users who prefer buying products or services locally, read this comprehensive guide to make you stand out in the digital marketing game.While focusing on local SEO strategies, it’s equally important to have your business properly structured. A good starting point is to look at a reliable service provider; the zenbusiness llc review  provides insights on one of the top choices for entrepreneurs aiming to solidify their business foundation.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving search engine visibility for local businesses, primarily with a physical presence in the offline market. By following local SEO best practices, businesses can improve organic traffic from searches performed by customers in nearby areas.

Benefits of Local SEO For Business

Local SEO Checklist can benefit your business because it helps 

• Boost your online visibility.
• Yield more sales to businesses with a brick-and-mortar location.
• Attract more targeted local traffic, which improves your chances of conversion.
• Enhance your credibility and build trust. 

Local SEO Checklist: 11 Actionable Tips That Works

Here is the Local SEO checklist to improve your visibility, ranking, and authority.

1. Optimize Google My Business Profile

Google my business is one of the most trusted business listing platforms for local businesses. Optimize your Google business profile to gain more conversions from people who are looking for products and services in their local area.

For Google my business optimization, you’ll want to:

• Create and verify a Google my business page
• Keep your profile updated with the latest business information
• Add logos, website, operational hours, payment methods, and images of the products/services you sell.
• Encourage your customers to write a review on your business profile
• Provide additional categories relevant to your business

Optimizing your business profile helps you stay up to date with the latest practices and improve customers’ experience.

2. Link your Google my business with social media

It is crucial to have a social presence for Google. Since you’ve created a compelling Google My Business profile page, you can add it to your social media. This will create a link between your Google and social media profiles, and drive the social media audiences to know more about your business or help buy your products.

Google search gives great importance to the shared content on social media. So, you can further optimize GMB by sharing fresh content regularly.

3. Ensure name, address, and phone number consistency

The NAP, stands for the name, address, and phone number (with area code) of a business. Your NAP should be considered crawlable HTML text on your site for Google to display it better according to location-based search results.

You’ve got to make it easy for people and search engines to find you, and to do this you have to set up your NAP.

4. Get regular reviews from happy customers

Encourage happy customers to write genuine reviews for your business which not only optimizes your GMB presence but also helps more local customers to buy from you.

Here are some tips to encourage customers to leave reviews:

• Ask for a review in person after the close of a sale
• Send a post-purchase email or text asking customers to write a review (but only after you’ve screened them via an internal survey to ensure you’re not approaching dissatisfied customers)
• Respond to existing reviews in a professional way, thanking reviewers and addressing complaints in not-so-favorable reviews

5. Optimize for Voice Search

Voice search is growing rapidly as the number of mobile users is increasing. For local SEO, it’s vital to optimize your content based on the user’s voice search queries apart from what they type.

Long tail keywords are most used by searchers when doing voice searches. When adding keywords related to voice search, make sure to adjust the SEO of your content that provides more of a conversational tone.

Also, you need to understand the user intent to exactly know what the user needs are when they perform a search by voice. If your business will be optimized for voice search, you’ll likely to appear and convert more users into customers.

6. Take advantage of local news or events for content

Creating content on the latest local news stories or events can help your business grab the attention of local customers. Build a strong content marketing strategy that aligns with your business location. You can start with writing blogs about local activities and events and go up to creating videos that can cover the local charities supported by the business.

Let’s say you’re a local real estate business. You can create different pages dedicated to specific regions that your business serves, and where you can feature hyperlocal content around news events or changes in the local real estate market.

7. Optimize online directories and citations

Use online directories and citations to gain higher authority for your business. By building strong domain authority, you’ll rank higher in search engines. However, make sure to avoid misspellings, abbreviations, or the wrong phone numbers in listings. If Google finds difficulty determining which information about your business is correct, it may not show your business at all in search results.

Also, consider removing duplicate listings you find in online directories.

8. Perform Local SEO audit

Once you have implemented the fundamentals, it helps to perform a comprehensive audit to know where your site stands and find new opportunities which help you achieve your goals. A local SEO audit may include the following:

• Google My Business Audit – Inspect the performance of your GMB in the SERP and check if the information is accurate.
• Google Search Console Audit – Make sure your site pages are crawlable. It could get crawling issues on certain pages, so perform the audit to fix them.
• On-page SEO audit – On-site auditing tells you a ranking of the pages and opportunities where improvements are needed.
• Competitor analysis – Competitor analysis provides you insights into your market competitors to help you improve your marketing strategy.
• Website audit – this will help you know the performance of your website.

9. On-page Optimization

Keep your clear and consistent on all sides. Performing on-page optimization gives you the opportunity to look out for improvements on the page for URL, title tags, meta description, content, internal linking structure, and headers.

While getting external links pointing to your site boosts authority and ranking, a proper internal linking structure is also important to make the navigation of the website easier. Internal links help visitors to jump from one content to another through a link connected.

Moreover, when you write content, use best practices for optimizing content for search engines by using high-volume keywords in the URL, title, header, meta description, and body.

10. Add location pages to your website.

If you operate in more than one location, add location pages to your website. Location pages provide readers with your name, address, phone number, store hours, unique store descriptions, parking/transit information, promotions, and testimonials from happy customers. Avoid creating duplicate content across multiple location pages.

For single location businesses, create a locally descriptive about us page. As a bonus, consider adding a Google map to your website on your respective location page.

11. Ensure a mobile-friendly website

Local and mobile search works together. Because of the handy nature of the mobile, customers use mobile to place an order, look for reviews, find directions and get contact information of a company. “Near Me” has increased 250% since 2017. Thus, if your site is optimized for mobile, your business has the possibility to grow and increase sales.

Here are some tips to achieve this:

• Ensure your website loads quickly. Three seconds is a perfect time you can aim for.
• Choose easy-to-read fonts
• Use responsive images which allow a perfect fit on the mobile screen of the users.
• Ensure intuitive UI for great UX

Local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving search engine visibility for local businesses, primarily those with brick-and-mortar locations. By following local SEO best practices, businesses can improve organic traffic from searches performed by customers in nearby areas.

Final Words

Fuel your business growth with the essentials of local SEO. Local SEO has become a major part of local businesses to draw the attention of the local searchers and bring in more sales. It is only possible with a profound strategy. You can our strategic tips to help you boost performance.

If it sounds struggle to you, w3speedup is ready to give a helping hand to you. With a team of SEO experts, our Local SEO services optimized hundreds of businesses increasing local sales. So, get in touch, and let’s start optimization.

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