To maximize online exposure and profitability, most local businesses must learn to compete in Google’s local and organic search results. Improving your business’ local SEO will heighten your chance of gaining more organic website traffic and customers. Whether you operate an Ottawa SEO agency, Toronto SEO agency, Google Analytics 4 consulting, or self storage Victoria, investing in local SEO will benefit your bottom line.
Here are five local SEO tips you should use.
1. Ask clients to write Google Reviews
You provide a valuable service or product to your community, and for that reason, you have a long list of happy, regular customers. These customers are priceless when it comes to promoting your brand to others in the region, and the best way to utilize their loyalty to your company is to encourage them to write reviews online.
There are many different ways to encourage customers to write and leave reviews for your brand. You can have your staff ask customers for their feedback, engage with the reviews that already exist for your business online, give them an incentive to leave a review (note: if you go this route, you are incentivizing reviews in general, not just good reviews), and utilize surveys.
2. Include Local Keywords In Your Title Tags and Body Content
It is common for SEO marketing to revolve around non-local content. While it’s not a bad idea to engage with a wider audience and receive more traffic to your site from non-local individuals, this isn’t necessarily where your focus should be. Creating local content can help maximize your content marketing efforts to produce more high-quality leads.
You can create content that revolves around events in your industry or local news. You can also incorporate local keywords into more general topics related to your product or service.
3. Submit your website to local directories
Many different directories help people find local services, and you should make sure you’re listed on there.
You’ll want to get yourself listed on global and national directories such as your local chamber of commerce or business organization.
4. Keep Your NAP Information Up-to-Date
Your NAP information is your name and place information. It’s vitally important that this information is consistent across the web. Google will notice inconsistent information across sites, which will raise red flags that your business is not legitimate.
- Name
- Address
- Phone Number
If your business relocates, opening a new location or getting a change in telephone number, make sure to correct this information everywhere it is listed. This means your website, social media pages, local directories, and more.
5. Optimize Your Website For Mobile
Optimizing your site for mobile is really important for having good SEO in general. In particular, it’s even more important when it comes to local SEO.
Why is that? Google’s own statistics point to the fact that roughly one-third of mobile searches are location-related. This means that many people searching for your service in your area will be doing so on a mobile device.
When your site doesn’t work well on smartphones or other mobile devices, you’re likely losing a good number of potential customers. Using an unoptimized site for mobile devices is frustrating, impractical, and not particularly confidence-inspiring. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, your potential customers are likely moving on to a local competitor’s website whose site functions properly on mobile devices.
