Local SEO: The Ultimate Guide To Help You Rank

There is a growing trend in something that is often overlooked and it’s costing many businesses loads of money. I am talking about local SEO, specifically understanding how reaching your local community to increase your rankings and boost awareness is a necessity. That’s why I have put together this ultimate guide to walk you through how to capitalize your local SEO.

First, a brief definition. Local SEO focuses on optimizing physical locations of businesses using locale-based keywords. Now, let’s hop into the guide!

Local Pack

This term refers to the trifecta (that’s 3) locations extracted from Google maps. For example, if you are a hair salon in London, every time someone types salon London, Google will pull up the Map Pack or Local Pack showcasing the top 3 items that come up.

As you can well imagine, being in that pack is critical to beat out the competition and get more organic traffic. Keep in mind that this requires quite a bit of SEO expertise, so consider contacting your local SEO agency in Glasgow as they will know how to utilize the algorithm to get you higher rankings.

To get started yourself make sure you are using store and city keywords as well as keeping all your NAP information consistent and up to date. (NAP is name, address, and phone number)

Google My Business

To access this great tool you will need to set up a profile. Again, don’t rush this part. Google can differentiate results down to the apartment or suite number of a business.

Once you have your business name, enter a keyword in GMB. Use the niche and city together for maximum local results. For our salon, this may be “hair salon east London”, then choose a radius and grid size.

Next, check your rankings with these details. This will provide you with a great visual showing how you rank within the city and adjust it accordingly.

On-Page SEO Checklist

Every page on your site counts. While on-page SEO could be a whole article in itself, and there are plenty, here are a few tips that will help you optimize each page for local organic rankings.

• Title Tag – Start your title tag with a keyword as close to the beginning as possible.
• Modify – Adding modifiers to your title will help you rank for long-tail keywords.
• Wrap It Up – Wrap your title in a <h1> tag.
• Images & Video – This is a must to ranking as a video increases time on your site and reduces the bounce rate.
• Be Responsive – By 2020 everyone will basically be using mobile and smart devices exclusively as the way to find places to shop.
• Links – Use outbound and internal links.
• Page Speed – Optimize your site for fast loading time to prevent bounce rates.
• Sharing – Social share buttons are a must.
• Content – Make it long, relevant, and engaging to increase “dwell time”. Google looks at this closely to judge the quality of your content.

Wrap Up

Local SEO matters so follow this ultimate guide to get your business on the map, the Map Pack that is. Make sure your NAP and other details are all updated and check your competitions ratings against yours using Google My Business. Finally, make sure your on-page SEO is on point with all the above tips and you can look forward to higher rankings and more traffic.