You might think your website has everything it needs to work right for you, but there may be some things you need to do to improve your local SEO reach.
Its important that your local shoppers find you online, especially if you aren’t reaching the local crowds the way you want. One of the best things you can do to improve your reach to the local area is to ensure your website is properly optimized. Let’s take a look at ten ways to improve your site so that you can reach the local audience much better.
1. Ensure your Google My Business Page is Complete
When you perform a search what do you look for. If you’re looking for local services you want to know how far away the location is and the hours of operation. Before you visit the site for that business you need to know if it’s where you want to go and open when you want to be there. This information is part of the Google My Business page, which should be complete. Online reviews also show up on this page to let customers see how much their neighbors like your business.
2. Check Each Page with Your Business Information
Review various pages where your business name shows up to ensure your name, address, and phone number are accurate and consistent. This is an important part of your local SEO. You want potential customers to be able to reach you and this information is how they do this. The NAP information should be included as crawlable HTML test on your website. Don’t include this information within an image, you want this information to be visible and easy to locate.
3. Don’t Stop Performing SEO Checking
Just because it seems that your SEO functions are running on autopilot, it’s not always the case. SEO is an ongoing process and it helps to audit this part of your website regularly. You’ll want to perform this audit for overall reach and for how your site appears and reaches your local audience. There are many ways for you to start this audit, but you should begin with your Google My Business account and move onward from there.
4. Check Your Content for Optimization
To make Google like your website, you need to ensure its easy for Google to crawl and check for various aspects. These items include optimizing the URL, title tags, headers, and meta descriptions of all of your content. Every new blog post is indexed and these aspects help you ensure Google can find your pages much easier. This is one of the most important factors in your local SEO approach. Once you’ve optimized your current content you’ll need to ensure everything you add to your website going forward fits into this package.
5. Put Some Locally-Focused Content in Your Package
If all of your content works on a global scale but not a local one, you need to fix this problem. This means you’ve got to create some local content that talks about places in your area and how the products and services you offer can improve the lives of your local audience. If you’re working to attract local residents to your business, you’ll want to show them some of the landmarks or talk about those areas in your content.
6. Add Inbound Linking to Your Local SEO Process
One of the best ways to get noticed is with excellent inbound links. These can come from sponsorships or partners, guest blog posts, or other outside entities. Start with the network in your area such as the Chamber of Commerce and work your way out rom there. Become a guest blogger for local businesses that can partner with you and help promote your business. This is a great way to get to know the people in your area.
7. Participate in Local Community Events
While this might not have any direct impact to your website when it comes to local SEO, but when you participate in community events you can rub elbows with potential customers and business owners. Your business might benefit from partnering with a nonprofit on a campaign, building a volunteer day, or you can become the sponsor of a local event. This helps get your name, face, and business out into the local community where you can enjoy some of the local events.
8. Check the Mobile-Usability of Your Website
More searches are performed online through mobile apps than ever before. In fact, today, if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’ll be losing out. It’s important that you verify your website works well in a mobile environment and gives your customers an easy way to get them to your site whether on their mobile phones or tablets. This is probably the most important way for you to check your SEO functionality, especially to the nearby community.
9. Does Your Website Have Location Pages?
Have you expanded your business to more than one location? If so, you’ll want to create location pages for each spot and have a website for each one as well. This helps you avoid confusing your potential customers and it allows them to find your business much easier. You don’t want to duplicate content across your multiple pages. One way to differentiate is to add a Google Map to your website for each location, which allows your customers to find your business much easier and know where each location is.
10. Your Internal Links Matter; Use Them
The external links help send users to your site from other sites while internal lings help boost your local SEO ranking and improve your authority in your industry. This type of linking supports website navigation, build information, and brings page authority and ranking power among your pages. This is an important part of making your website work well for your business. If you want your pages to show up at the top of the Google Search Results you need to add the right internal links to your pages.
This post may contain affiliate links. Meaning a commission is given should you decide to make a purchase through these links, at no cost to you. All products shown are researched and tested to give an accurate review for you.