6 Ways to Boost Local SEO
Would you like to get more visitors into your shop or use your services? Of course you would, who wouldn’t want to sell more products and increase their revenue.
Local businesses have a unique advantage over larger brands when it comes to localisation. Backed by campaigns such as Small Business Saturday and popular “shoplocal” hashtags, customers want to buy from local businesses and support the area.
So how can you take advantage of your location? Local SEO.
By putting the following into practice you’ll boost your local SEO and get a steady stream of new customers.
If you’re unsure of any of the terms in this article you can find the explanation in our SEO Glossary.
Keyword + Location
The first thing you’ll need to do boost your local SEO is to identify the keyword you want to rank for and add your local area.
E.g. our website can be found by searching “digital marketing agency Tameside”. The Mechanised website appears on the local map pack and in the organic search results.
Once you have your keyword + location you’ll need to add it to your website. The most important places to add your keyword + location is your meta title and H1 heading.
If the page you want to rank is an internal page then you’ll want to add the keyword + location to the URL. E.g. yourwebsite.co.uk/keyword-location.
Google My Business
The next thing you want to do is to create a Google My Business profile to enable your business to be shown on the local map pack. The advantage of appearing on the local pack map is that it appears above the first organic search results. If you have completed your Google My Business profile, you’ll be able to display key information such as a link to your website, directions, phone number, opening hours and reviews.
This information has a huge advantage for a customer searching to buy from local businesses.
Similar to Google My Business is Bing Places. Bing Places offers the same features for people using the Bing search engine and we recommend to create your profile on here as well.
If you’re unsure how you create a profile take a look at our guide to setting up Google My Business.
Reviews
Now that you’ve got your Google My Business profile complete and verified, you’ll want to get some reviews. Google recently changed the way reviews work for businesses, making it easier to get your overall rating displayed.
If you’ve already got some good reviews on your Facebook page or on your website, ask your customers if they would post their review on Google as well. If your business is appearing in the local pack showing an overall five star rating from several people it will boost your credibility.
Local Citations
A local citation is any mention of a local business on the internet. To boost your local SEO efforts you’ll want to list your business on local directories. Local directories send massive signals to Google and confirms the local area you are in.
Here are some example directories that you should add your business to.
- Google My Business
- Bing Places
- Central Index
- Cylex
- Three Best Rated
- Yelp
- Trip Advisor
- Four Square
- Other local directories in your area
Name, Address, Phone Number
One of the most important aspects of local SEO is consistent contact information.
Name, address, phone number or NAP, are your business contact details and they have to be identical on your website and local citations. Consistent contact information will prevent search engines from getting confused about your business.
Link Partnerships
Gaining quality links will boost your overall SEO efforts, but links from local businesses will boost your local SEO efforts. Acquiring high quality links requires a lot of effort and time but if you target local businesses it can be much easier.
If you work with other local businesses they can help you rank in the local area. Partners, suppliers, friends, distributors and wholesalers etc can be perfect for getting a link. You can ask to have your link added in the footer or a specific Partners page, and you can do the same for them. This way both businesses will benefit from the local link effect.
Ideally you’ll only want to link to websites with a good domain authority as their links will pass on more link equity. But starting out, any links will be good.
