A local SEO plan is a necessary part in maintaining your business’ relevance across the search engines today. When you have a sound plan in place you’ll be prepared to optimize your business’ website everywhere it appears online so that your visitors are shown relevant, up-to-date facts about your business. While this starts with optimizing your website’s content, it also consists of making sure that directories have your current information. Doing so will help people find you when they need your products or services.
Why it’s High Time to pay Attention
With the rise of mobile browsing the importance of local SEO is even greater today than ever before. To demonstrate this importance, consider this fact: Google says that “near me” searches are growing about 146% per year. There’s no doubt you want your business to show up in these local searches today. This importance has grown even stronger now that Google has created a layout that places organic search results underneath the page fold, leaving ads and the local pack clearly visible at the top of the page. These receive over 90% of clicks. To remain relevant here you must make sure you appear in the local pack.
How to Optimize Your Business for Local SEO
Here’s what you need to do today to make sure you have good SEO in place and can be found by your local clients:
- Make sure you have consistent Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) data that’s updated on all important sites where you have a citation profile. This should be in sync everywhere including your website, search engines, citation sources, directories, maps, apps, and on social media. By adding content to these pages on a regular basis you’re more likely to do better when it comes to your local SEO. Things you can easily add here include events, offers, product lists, and menus. When you add these things, make sure you also use schema markup and structured data so you rank even higher.
- Always add local content to your listings, as well as your location pages. This is important because search engines determine your ranking based on the number of webpages who link to you and if your information is consistently found in other places online.
- Keep an eye on your online reputation and always share first-party reviews on your location pages.
- Get some backlinks from top local search sites and directories. Remember, websites are more likely to link to other sites that contain rich content.
- It’s important for your listings to include rich content. Do this by adding images, descriptions, and directions to these listings when possible. This information will also help your visitor quickly decide that you’re right for them.
- Create and manage local pages for each location that your business maintains. It’s important for each of these pages to be built with SEO best practices in mind – especially local SEO if you are running a brick and mortar business. Taking the time to do this may feel time consuming at the moment, but ultimately it will help you increase your business and thus your bottom line too.
Conclusion
With Google’s new search layout, it’s vital for your business to have good local SEO practices. Of course, you may be thinking that this means yet another thing you must do today. Fortunately for you, ISEOU understands how busy you are and how your business still needs attention from your local community. Over the years they’ve successfully helped many businesses like yours manage their needs and increase their traffic. Get in touch with them today so your business can be next.