Important Factors for Local SEO
With the latest update of Google’s search algorithm, your business can highly benefit from local SEO. But there are important factors that you should know to fully maximize this strategy.
On-Page
To maximize the benefits of local SEO, make sure that Google understands your location. You can do so by adding your city or region in your title tags, meta description and URLs. Don’t forget the H1 and H2 tags, as well as the alt text image tags.
It’s also a good practice to add your company’s name, phone number and complete address on every footer of every page. You may create a geo sitemap and KML file.
Off-page
This one can be quite tricky as you’ll need to reach out to other local businesses. What you need to do here is to obtain as much citations and mentions as possible. You can do so by registering your business to a local directly or listing.
When you go about off-page optimization, you should be consistent in your complete address details. A single mistake can impact your site’s positioning.
User Reviews
Generating comments and reviews about your business from your actual users or customers can improve local SEO results. These comments and reviews are important for Google as the company loves any type of user-generated content.
To encourage your visitors or customers to review your site, add buttons on your site to let them know that they can rate your site on public directories.
On your social media accounts, encourage your followers and friends to make comments about your site or brand. If you received negative comments, make sure that you answer each of them with decency.
Social Traffic
SEO experts aren’t entirely sure how social traffic can affect your site’s ranking. Even though Google confirmed that it doesn’t use social signals in ranking a site, there are several data showing that there’s a positive correlation. Social traffic remains an important factor for local SEO in terms of brand awareness, as well as driving organic traffic to your site.
Optimize for Mobile
More and more users are using their phones or tablets to visit certain websites or shop. Thus, it’s important that your site is mobile-optimized. Then, make sure that you highlight those useful pieces of details about your company so your customers can easily interact with your site. Adding a click-to-call extension is very useful for them so they can easily contact you.
