Here are ten tips to help your local SEO. If your company is all about serving people in your area, you need to look in to the local SEO. And for a valid reason: 25% of Google searches are about local things. And 85% of people who use the Internet have already used a search engine to find local businesses. But what’s interesting concerning local searches is that 88% of localized handset searches lead to a visit as well as phone call within 24 hours. This is especially true on smartphones.
Now with your attention, here are 10 essential points for enhancing your local SEO and getting more people from your area to visit your site.
- Put your on-page SEO in a location. It is important to use relevant keywords on your web pages, whether they are in the titles (h1, h2, etc.) or the body of the text. But it can be hard to stand out from your competitors on keywords that are very popular and very competitive. For example, “hair stylist” is a very prevalent and very marketable keyword. With just this one keyword, it will be hard for a hair salon to do well in Google’s search results (especially since it would not necessarily be relevant). But by adding a city to the keyword (like “hairdresser Lyon”), the company improves its local referencing a lot. So, when you do on-page SEO, you should always think about where the page is.
- Make sure your title and meta description are optimized The title tags and the meta description might not have a direct effect on local SEO, but they do have an indirect effect that can’t be denied. This means that these two things will (most of the time) come up in Google search results. This information will help people decide that what link to click on. By saying where you are in your title tags and meta description (for example, “Dentist in Nantes”), you make it much more likely that people will click on your link. Also, these Internet users won’t be let down because they will find exactly what they want where they want it. This is a positive indication for Google, which could strengthen your site’s ranking over moment if it sees that people who hunt for your keyword like your site.
- Make your Google My Business page work for you. Google made Google My Business so that local businesses could have a good page with their contact information and details about what they do. This page is also on Google Maps. It looks a lot like the professional pages on Google+. So, having a Google My Business account lets local businesses show up well in geo located searches and give potential customers all the information they need, like the address, email, phone number, map, types of products sold, etc.
Here are some ways to improve your My Business page:
- Make sure your company name, address, and phone number are correct;
- Stand out with original and high-quality photos;
- Choose categories that are as specific as possible (like “Fresh vegetable shop” instead of “Clothing store”) to make your business easier to find.
- Illustrate the best reviews left by Internet users as well as respond to negative reviews in a reassuring way. • Offer a 360° virtual tour of your company to draw in even more customers.
Read also: Local SEO: 5 things you should do to be mentioned (well) on Google Maps.
- List in local directories If paper directories are dead, online ones are becoming more popular. Pages People who use the Internet often use Jaunes, Yelp, and even TripAdvisor to find a specific place in their area. Also, these sites let them leave reviews that let other people know if the products being sold are good or not. However, for this strategy to work, make certain that every piece of data is the same. This is the most effective approach for enhancing your seo Services and retain clients from leaving due to being confused by various bits of information.
- Take care of the micro formats on your site To improve your SEO for local searches, you should use micro formats to give Google more information. These enriched tags help search engines figure out how your site is put together so they can rank you better. Let’s say you have a seo agency at 90-15 Queens Boulevard Queens. Here’s the code you need to put on your site: div =”name” =”http://schema.org/seoagency”> seoagecny/span> div =”address” =”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”> street address/span> 90-15 Queens Boulevard Queens </span> <span =”addressLocality”> USA</span >, <span =”addressRegion”> USA</span> <span =”postalCode”> 11373</span> </div> Google will then know what kind of business you have and be able to find it on a map with more accuracy.
- Ask people to write reviews As we’ve already said, when you sign up for directories or make a Google My Business page, you let people know what you think. This is something good. The better a place is rated on the different sites, the higher it is in the search results. By asking happy customers to rate you and tell you what they think, you can improve your local SEO.
- Develop a mobile site If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, the points below won’t help you. First, smartphones are used for 60% of local searches. You can also use voice search on your phone to find nearby businesses. Let’s just say that if your site is hard to read on a small screen, you could lose a lot of traffic and sales.
Read also: Managing your presence: 4 key visibility levers. 1. Set up a retail locator
We’ve already told you how to improve your local SEO as well as make it simple for consumers to find you online by optimizing your Google My Business page. But a store locator strategy is also important if you want to get as many people into your store as possible. We tell you why. The store locator seems to be an online resource that allows a user to find the retail outlet or other physical sale location that is closest to him. This characteristic is easy to use and can be discovered on websites and mobile apps. Most of the time, this tool uses the user’s geo location to show him the store closest to his home. In some cases, the user has to type in his postal code before he can see a list of businesses. With the help of the store locator, it’s easy to find out when a place is open and how to get there. It’s also a good way to see if a commodity is in stock before you move.
A dealer locator plan is an excellent notion because, on ordinary, 90% of Internet users look for information before going to a store:
- Get more customers and make more sales in your store.
- Give Internet users peace of mind (so that if they need service after the sale, they know where to find you).
- Improve your local SEO.
- Measure the effect of your sales in stores on your website traffic.
You can already improve your website’s local SEO by adding plug-ins or easy-to-use SaaS software.Users will be happy to find out that one of your places is near them, and they won’t hesitate to go there. Most of the time, a store locator is used with other web-to-store or app-to-store strategies to bring as many people as possible to real-world points of sale. Use presence management tools Before we talk about how presence management can help you improve your local SEO, let’s talk about what it is. Presence management is a valuable tool that lets you manage and update your business’s practical information in one place so that it’s up to date on all the digital channels where you’re present (e.g., Google My Business, Apple Maps, etc.) Why do you find it interesting? Since these systems have had the best online resources that you can use to get ahead quickly and for free.
These channels automatically share your business’s information (address, minutes, phone number, etc.), which helps your web presence and local SEO. So, this information must be uniform and consistent. In this case, Internet users who saw that your store was “open” on the web but was closed that day could be disappointed when they went there. As you’ll see, using a presence management strategy to improve your local SEO will save a lot of time. But most of all, it lets you make sure that your information is the same on all of the digital channels you use.
- Our advice for an effective presence management
- Give as much data as you can about your business.
- Maintain the details (opening hours, identity, phone number, etc.) up to date.
- Make sure the information you post on all of these digital platforms is the same.
- Make an online-to-offline plan.
We’ve already told you about the higher locator stores and how much traffic they send to real points of sale. Most of the time, they are part of a bigger plan to get people from the web to the store. Web-to-store, also known as “Research Online, Buy Offline” (ROPO), is a strategy that tries to get Internet users interested on the web so they will go to real-world stores. Through web-to-store, digital marketing and physical points of sale work together to give customers an even better shopping experience. It’s a wonderful means by which companies to find out more about there own customers and cater to their demands. Let’s go over three web-to-store strategies you can use to improve your local SEO. Let’s go!