Gone are the days of using Yellow Pages to find local business; that search has moved online.
With the ever-increasing importance Google places on local search, marketers will need to up their SEO game, namely within a certain region. We’ll look at on-page local SEO elements to include, important link building strategies, customer reviews, and the creation of solid local SEO content.
Local SEO Must-Haves
Before you can get to the local content, you’ll need to ensure that both your website and the pages within it are locally search optimized. Some important elements to include:
- Add NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) to the header or footer of your website.
- Use the name of your city and its suburbs throughout site pages.
- Include a Google Map so people can find your location and the areas you serve.
Also optimize any pages with local keywords in the following places:
- Title tags
- Meta description
- H1 tags (your headline)
- Body copy
- Anchor text
- Bold and italics tags
- URLs
- Alt text in images
Local link building is also important. You want high quality links, like those from chamber and tourism directories, fellow local businesses, and local “best” lists.
Encourage and Utilize Customer Reviews
It may seem like there’s little you can do to get customer reviews, but simply asking happy customers to leave reviews and making it easy for them to leave them via links to review sites, can go a long way. Reviews will help you climb local SEO rankings and you can repurpose the content from reviews within the content you create.
Create Local SEO Content
You can create local content using your in-house marketing team or by finding local guest bloggers. Some places to start when brainstorming your local content include:
Show Some Love for Your Community
Demonstrate your involvement with your community and that you know what’s going on in your area. Support an activity or cause in your community. Talk about local news and events. Share stories related to your employees or customers. All can act as great local content.
What Do the Locals Care About?
While content always does great when you’re interested in the topic, try to look beyond topics you’re interested in. Discover what local customers care about and provide the content they are looking for.
Create Local Case Studies
The best way to convince local customers that your product or service works is to prove its success, especially when success takes place in the same location as theirs. Share a regional success story to prove your product’s effectiveness.
Use Guest Bloggers
It’s not all on you to create local content. Find bloggers from your community to guest blog and put a local spin on your business. This allows you to better vary your content, expand your audience, and takes some of the pressure off of you.
Final Thoughts
Always remember that content needs to be useful and informative. Although this should go without saying, high quality content always does better than low quality. It’s better for SEO and, more importantly, it’s better for your perception from consumers. Poor content may just backfire and leave a bad taste in potential customers’ mouths.
Other Local SEO Resources:
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