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Local SEO isn’t just another service we offer at Webology. It’s probably the most important service we offer for local businesses. Here’s why:

46% of all searches in Google are seeking LOCAL information.

Out of those searches, about 88% either called or visited a local business within 24 hours. That’s why local SEO is possibly the most important service we can offer to help you grow your business. It connects your brand to local customers who are actively seeking the product or service you offer. Local SEO is earned media that captures highly qualified leads at the point of making a purchasing decision. More on that in just a bit… But if you already have a good understanding of how SEO can help your local business, feel free to skip the rest of this article and give us a call. Otherwise, let’s take a look at what local SEO is and why it needs to be a big part of your overall marketing strategy.

To understand Local SEO, you need to understand how all search marketing works first. Search Engine Optimization is simply the practice of helping search engines like Google and Bing to better understand the content of your website. Search engines rely on advertising revenue. As such, they only want to serve up the best content on page #1 so that users consistently use their service instead of the other search engines. It’s commonly referred to as satisfying user intent.     This allows them to sell more ads, and it’s the reason Google gets more visits than Bing and other search engines. Generally speaking, Google does a better job at serving relevant information that matches what we are looking for when we search. That’s why Google gets about 63% of all the search traffic in the US. So, how does that work locally?

Mastering Local SEO to take market share away from your competition

Local SEO specifically targets a geographic region to improve brand visibility around location-specific terms like:

• in Birmingham, AL
• Where can I find near me?
• Who is the best

By improving your website’s visibility in Google around these terms, we can increase your market share, thereby capturing leads that otherwise would have gone to your competitors. Local SEO helps you grow your brand presence and increase sales.

Now that you know what local SEO is and how it can benefit your brand, you need to find the best way forward.

• Is local SEO important for a small local business website like mine?
• As a small business, should I be using an SEO marketing agency?
• What are the best local SEO strategies for small businesses?
• Are there any affordable SEO services within my budget?

These are all very important questions you might be asking yourself. If that’s the case, feel free to reach out for a 100% free SEO strategy consultation. We won’t try to sell you during the consult. Our goal is simply to help you make the right decision for your business.

This is the subjective part of local SEO that tends to confuse and cause distrust. It’s a common sales tactic within the industry for an agency or freelancer to call you and point out what your current SEO provider is not doing. With over 200 different ranking factors used to determine who ranks on page # 1, this is an easy conversation-starter for any salesperson. However, these sales tactics deceptively ignore what your SEO team is doing and whether or not your current strategy will produce a better ROI than focusing on other areas first. A good local SEO expert will constantly test and benchmark different tactics to see what delivers the best returns for their clients. Does a particular task consistently improve local map rankings? Is it something we can do safely without risking a Google penalty? Are there better uses of our time that will deliver better results for the client? Those are the questions the salesperson doesn’t want you to think about. These are all important things to consider in any local SEO campaign, and any good agency is going to test tactics before they implement them on client websites. It’s not always the case that you need a ‘2nd set of eyes’ on your SEO strategy. Chances are, your current provider is doing what they have proven to work over time. If you’re still not sure though, reach out for a free consult. We’ll let you skip the sales pitch and speak directly with an SEO strategist who can dig deep and find new opportunities to improve your local brand awareness…even if that means you take those ideas back to your current SEO provider. We want you to do what works best for your business, even if that means going elsewhere or doing the work yourself.

At the time of writing, we’re seeing the most improvements by focusing on the tasks listed below. SEO is a constantly changing industry though, so we must continue to do our R&D to make sure we’re not wasting your time on fads and trends that don’t really deliver. Here’s what’s working for our clients right now:

Google My Business Optimization – Savvy Local SEO Tips for Google My Business

Your Google My Business listing is probably the 2nd most important digital real estate you own, with your website being first. This is the listing that displays in the local map results when someone searches for a business like yours. Most GMB listings are incomplete and not fully optimized to rank in the local maps. At a minimum, your listing should include:

• Properly categorized business descriptions
• Accurate NAP data (Name, Address, Phone Number)
• As many relevant photos as possible that are:
  • Unique representations of your brand
  • Personal and genuine
  • Spread out over the different categories
  • Geotagged with EXIF descriptions and local Lat/Long data
• Videos that showcase your brand and include a call to action
• An informative business description
• Frequent posts that include a mix of information and offers
• Accurate hours of operation
• Genuine customer reviews and responses to each review

That’s the foundation of your local SEO campaign. Listing optimization is critical to your success and it only takes a little time to setup a profile correctly. After your initial setup, your listing should be actively managed. You should consistently post updates from your blog and mention unique offers. Add new photos as often as possible, and be sure to respond to all reviews on your profile. Once this is done, you can move on to optimizing your website for local search.

Locally Focused Content Marketing

Content is king, right? But what does that really mean? If you’re a local business it means you have to pull double duty in your content writing efforts. You have to be relevant to your industry while also writing about locally important topics. Before you jump right into blogging about the next upcoming local event though, it’s important to step back and look at your existing content. Do you have enough quality content on the main pages of your website? Probably not…

Optimizing Content on your Main Pages

Do you even have all the pages that you need to take full advantage of local content marketing? Probably not, but here’s a good place to begin. Sit down and spend some time listing out every possible service you can offer. If you’re a marketing agency it might look something like this:

Even if it’s a service you rarely offer, it probably needs to make the list. Why? If you rarely offer it, chances are your competition didn’t bother to create a page around that product or service. That’s an opportunity your brand needs to exploit, and it can often be very lucrative… One of our clients does glass work. He’s the only person in his market who has bothered to write service pages for things like bulletproof glass, buffet table sneeze guards, and glass partitions. Guess what… That business has already closed multiple 5 figure jobs off a single page with less than 1,000 words that we wrote 60 days ago. A single piece of content that cost the business less than $100 has already produced an exponential ROI that is well over 1000% for our client. Effective content marketing starts by understanding both the services you offer and the local markets you’re selling to. It doesn’t always work out as well as it did in the example above, but it might. Can you afford to miss out on those big deals just because you didn’t take the time to explain each and every service you offer to online shoppers?

Making your Content Speak to the Local Market

Once you’ve identified all the product or service pages you need on your site, it’s important to tailor your content to the right (local) audience. Buyer persona exercises can help identify who you’re marketing to. Once you’ve done those, find ways to integrate locally relevant topics onto each product or service page. Just be sure to avoid the appearance of keyword stuffing by writing naturally and only focusing on what’s relevant to the local audience…satisfy user intent and Google will reward you. Once you’ve built up your main pages, be sure to blog as frequently as possible while also focusing on quality. Here’s a few tips for effective local blogging:

• Post on a consistent schedule – Publish on the same dates and times each month
• Post a mix of locally relevant topics along with your industry topics
• Interlink your posts with other related posts and important pages on your site

Once you get these basics out of the way, move on to technical SEO and other important tasks, but never stop improving your content. Advanced content optimization tactics can allow you to optimize for featured snippets which get 8.6% of all search traffic when they are present.

Local Business Directory Submissions

The next big area of focus needs to be on local business directory submissions, which are also commonly referred to as citations. These are any of the places your brand’s name, address, and phone number (NAP data) are found online. We suggest exercising caution here and not wasting too much time doing the work yourself. It’s easy to do citations the wrong way. Even if you get it right, this is a time-consuming process that’s best outsourced and automated whenever possible. Consistency and accuracy in listing data is still very important to your overall ranking. One of the easiest ways to make sure your data is accurate is to manage it through a service like Yext, the main data aggregators, or a combination of both. When we do local SEO we start with Yext and the aggregators. After that, we submit manual listings to about 250 different sites that aren’t covered in those services. Next, we use several tools to identify both local directories and industry specific directories that provide a powerful citation source for our clients. It’s important to note that these are considered to be ‘foundational’ links. They help balance out anchor text ratios and make your site look reputable to Google and other search engines.

On-Page SEO Strategy

That’s definitely admirable, and it tells me you take your business seriously. Most of what we’ve discussed so far can be handled DIY if you have some basic skills…and lots of spare time. If time’s an issue though, definitely reach out for help with your content and basic setup. Even if it’s not, you should consider outsourcing the technical SEO work to a specialist. And that probably isn’t your web developer… SEO strategy is a highly-specialized skill that requires years to master. It goes way beyond just understanding PHP/HTML development and good landing page design. No offense intended if you’re reading this and you also happen to be a pro coder! It’s just a completely different skillset, and very few have mastered both. Time and experimentation are required to truly understand what works and what doesn’t in local search. Here’s what we’ve found to be important over the last few years:

• Local NAP data displayed on each page of the site
• Keywords in meta titles
• Image alt tags
• Internal linking
• Structured data
• Proper heading tags
• Social Media and Google Maps API integration
• Robots.txt and sitemap setup
• Keywords in URLs

That’s some of the most important tasks, but they all rely on a keyword strategy that has to be decided on before beginning any work. Planning that strategy can take an expert days in some cases. It’s best to outsource this work to someone who does SEO on a daily basis.

Building Backlinks with LOCAL Relevancy

Once you’ve gotten all the other fundamentals out of the way, it’s time to look at building links. This is a topic that gets a bad reputation in the SEO world, but links are just as critical as they always have been. Focus on earning links from sites that have local relevance while also getting link placement on authority sites within your industry. What does that even mean? I know…there’s a version of that statement on almost every website that deals with local SEO. It doesn’t help our reputation for being vague and mysterious, does it? The answer to what that really means is best learned in a classroom or over many months of research though. I can’t really explain it fully without adding a few thousand extra words to this section! A knowledgeable link builder looks at several metrics to evaluate the quality and impact a single link will most likely produce. Think 3D Chess… -What’s the current anchor text ratio of the client site? -How about the page we’re linking to? -What’s the Domain Score of the linking site? -How about the PageRank of the linking page? -Is there any link spam in the 2nd tier we should be aware of? My best advice is to exercise caution when building links. SEMrush has an excellent tool that allows you to enter a set of keywords and competitors. Once you do that, it crawls the web to find the most important backlinks based on your criteria. If you’re new to SEO, that tool will keep you on the straight and narrow for the most part. If you don’t have access though, you can always just focus on blogs that write about your industry and local news publications in your link-building efforts.

All that work! It can seem overwhelming to think about everything you need to do to really leverage SEO the right way. If you’re busy, it might make more sense to outsource the work to an expert SEO. But how do you find a reputable company that’s excellent at local SEO? To start, check out their website. Do they have informative content that seems to be genuinely written internally by an expert? How do they rank in Google when you type in SEO agency ? It’s true that this is a highly competitive industry, but a legitimate firm should have some exposure on the first page. While you’re there, take a look at their reviews. Those are just a few of the steps you should take when searching for a new company to handle your SEO.

Chances are, if you bothered to read this whole section, you must be committed to growing your brand through organic search marketing. We’d love to help you get started by offering a free consultation and overview of your existing digital presence. As a full service agency, we can also help in other areas like web design, social media, and paid search advertising. More importantly, we can help you decide on the right mix of strategies to grow your brand through digital marketing. Reach out to schedule your free consultation today.