What is Local SEO? And How to Do it?

Local SEO is a boon for businesses with physical locations and businesses that serve in any specific area.

Local SEO helps small and medium-sized businesses get more leads and generate more revenue by cutting down the worldwide online competition.

Your business can easily get more sales and increase revenue if you invest your time and efforts in local SEO.

What is Local SEO?

Local search engine optimization (SEO) enhances a company’s online visibility in Google’s local search engine rankings. Local search engine optimization is useful for any company that either maintains a physical site or provides services to a specific area.

Early Days of the Web Search:

In the early days of web search, navigating the web search engines was easy because there were only a few websites and online businesses on the web.

But when the internet started to expand with all the businesses coming to the digital market and increasing their online presence, it became more competitive for small businesses to get more customers and appear on search results.

However, the concept of local SEO made it easy for small and medium-sized businesses to get a good amount of online presence and increase sales and revenue with the help of Local SEO.

How Do Search Engines Work?

To return a list of sites relevant to your search, Google analyses the pattern of several website signals or ranking variables, such as the relevance of your site.

You won’t necessarily get instantaneous results if you type something into Google. You’re looking through a cached version of all the sites Google has indexed. The Google Index is the official name for this replica.

Google’s index is built by a network of “spiders,” which are little programs that systematically explore the web. Each spider operates similarly: it begins its crawl on a single page, proceeds to other pages via the links within, and so on.

Google’s index is continually updated when new content is crawled, saved, and indexed. The spiders’ labor is quite impressive, as they crawl trillions of pages at lightning speed, day and night. This helps keep the index fresh and facilitates the rapid identification of new sites and connections.

How Do I do Local SEO?

1. Take Stock of your Services and Products
2. Audit your Existing Website
3. Conduct Competitor Research
4. Identify Geo Specific Keyword
5. Implement On-page SEO
6. Create Localized landing Pages
7. Optimize your Google My Business Listing
8. Submit Key Business Info to Directory Listings
9. Establish a Localized Link Building Strategy
10. Generate Positive Customer Reviews

1. Take Stock of your Services and Products:

You have to figure out for which term you want your business to rank and write down those ideal keywords for your business to rank.

For example, you can take keywords of the products and services you offer to appear on the first page of search engines.

If you offer social media marketing, you can use “Facebook marketing services in London”, Best UK Twitter marketing”.

Also, if you run a restaurant, you can go for “best UK food”, or “the best restaurant in London” to rank your business and get more customers.

You can use keyword tools to find out which keyword might be the best for your services and has a high search volume to get more traffic and increase your sales.

2. Audit your Existing Website:

You have to audit your existing website and solve the SEO issues that affect your website’s performance and user experience.

Auditing your website and enhancing it for users will help you get more customers and increase sales for your business.

You have to check and fix slow site speed, missing page titles, missing meta descriptions, broken links, duplicate content, NO XML sitemap, No https security, poor indexation, poor mobile optimization, etc.

3. Conduct Competitor Research:

You have to conduct competitor research and find out your competitors’ strategies to increase their sales and revenue.

You have to keep an eye on your competitors and learn from them to create a proven strategy to increase sales and revenue for your business.

You have to put enough time and effort into creating a proven strategy for your business to get more sales and revenue.

4. Identify Geo-Specific Keywords:

You have to use and identify geo-specific keywords to thrive your business’s online presence and generate more leads.

Geo-specific keywords like the best restaurant in the UK, best social media marketing in London, best food in the UK, best pancakes in London, etc., will help your business easily appear on your area’s first search engine page.

5. Implement On-page SEO:

You have to implement on-page SEO on your website to pass the link juice and increase your website’s domain authority.

By implementing on-page SEO, you can drive traffic on dead pages of your website and give your website get more credibility on search engines.

On-page SEO will positively impact search engine results and help you appear higher on search engine result web pages.

6. Create Localized landing Pages:

Pages optimized for organic local search results are known as “localized landing pages.” These pages need to include relevant, helpful content that brings in your ideal customer and geo-specific keywords.

When designing a landing page, it’s important to follow best practices like optimized H1, H2, and H3 headings, writing keyword-optimized body text, integrating internal links, adding photos, and optimizing the mobile search.

If you optimize your advertising effectively, you may direct both organic and paid traffic to your landing pages. You should put in strong CTAs to get them to contact you.

7. Optimize Google My Business Listing:

You can optimize your google my business listing to get more views and traffic on your website and increase sales and revenue for your business.

Google my business listing is a free platform where you can list your business and provide your business details so that customers can easily attract to your business and give reviews about your business online.

Optimizing the google my business listing can make your business more visible to your ideal customers online.

8. Submit Key Business Info to Directory Listings:

There are additional online directories besides GMB where you can list your company. Yelp, YellowPages, Bing Places, and the Better Business Bureau are four of the most trustworthy web directories, but there are innumerable others.

This strategy aims to boost local search engine optimization (SEO) by submitting your material to high-quality, relevant directories. Maintaining NAPW (name, address, phone number, and web address) consistency is crucial here.

9. Establish a Localized Link Building Strategy:

Although link building is a crucial aspect of search engine optimization in general, its implementation may vary depending on the context of the site being optimized. In this case, the location of the sites that connect to yours is equally relevant.

Do what you can to get links from local establishments. Produce regionally relevant material to attract regionally relevant connections; also, solicit regionally relevant anchor text for optimum results.

10. Generative Positive Customer Reviews:

The quantity and quality of reviews can greatly influence your website’s local search engine rankings it has received on Google My Business. As a local business owner, one of your primary objectives should be to increase your number of favorable evaluations, ideally across all of your directory sites.

Exit interviews are an excellent approach to getting feedback from clients after an engagement has ended. Another option is asking for reviews on Google My Business, Yelp, Facebook, etc., via follow-up emails to satisfied customers.

In the same vein, you must address any negative feedback you receive. An appropriate and kind reply can do wonders. No one likes hearing criticism, but how you handle it can speak volumes.