“This will be the year of mobile” was a staple joke at most search marketing conferences in the 2010s. While everyone was aware of the rise in mobile usage, the usefulness of mobile targeting seemed to be lagging far behind. Have things changed in 2020?
Users are mobile, determined by the percentage of searches done on mobile, search results are personalized to the user's location, and Google employs a principle called “mobile first” in its crawls. and website indexing.
To understand what this means, consider the example of someone looking for “pizza”. What does it mean when you type “pizza” on your desktop computer?
Maybe you're looking for recipe ideas or take-out services. But when you type “pizza” on your smartphone, it has a completely different meaning. Something like, “I want pizza right now, where can I buy it?” Your search results will also show restaurants serving pizza near your actual location. Are you still hungry?
Overview: What is local SEO?
How is local SEO different from other types of SEO?
Search engines are getting better at meeting user expectations. Personalization of search results has come a long way. Local SEO strategies are not as clear-cut as more general SEO strategies. You can generate even more results by combining traditional SEO with local SEO. Let’s take a look at more features of local SEO below.
footsteps instead of clicks
SEO for your local business is not about making money, it’s about delivering tangible results. Visibility. For most local businesses, that means driving people to their stores rather than traffic to their websites.
difficult to monitor
What is a local search? This is a search via your smartphone that may cause your site to appear in a 'local pack'. This is a personalized content block containing a map and local links to nearby results based on the user's GMS coordinates.
Alternatively, you can perform a general search using keywords and location modifiers on your desktop computer. I'm looking for a gym in a specific area. Or it could be a search performed from within a search engine's map application when the user is in a particular location. It's easy to track “gym + neighborhood” but difficult to track her other two searches.
I don't know much about the site
The goal of local SEO is store footfall (the number of people entering your store or shopping area in a given amount of time), but your site isn't always your most important asset. In Google SERP, Your shop's Google My Business (GMB) profile will be more likely to appear in local packs.That's you You need to optimize it using the right keywords, make sure you choose the right category and the right address.
Benchmarking is difficult
Measuring pedestrian traffic is more difficult than measuring online traffic. It can also be difficult to connect physical visitors to online actions. Google Analytics allows you to do this to some extent with “Store Visit” tracking, but it's not accurate. It becomes almost impossible to compare local SEO results with other sites. Are your results good or bad? Hard to tell.
5 Strategies to Optimize Local SEO
The word “strategy” is perhaps an overstatement for the local SEO tips listed below. Optimizing for local SEO is not a step-by-step process, but rather a task that can be performed on many different aspects simultaneously.
1. Build a local business profile
The first place to go is your Google My Business profile. This is similar to a Facebook Business Page, Amazon Brand Store, or LinkedIn Business Profile, which you will also need to create. This is a Google-hosted page with all your business details. Show your business hours or show up on Google Maps when people are searching for directions. There's also a Bing equivalent, the Bing Places for Business profile.
Then claim your profile or create one from scratch on YELP, Apple Maps, Yellow Pages, Foursquare, and Yahoo Localworks. Outside of North America, local business directories and yellow pages may be combined directly or indirectly with search engines to provide local results.
Bing may show Tripadvisor, Foursquare, and Facebook profiles in your search results. The stronger your business profile, the better. These are backdoors to local search results pages.
2. Optimize for local packs
Several factors come into play to land a spot in the highly coveted local pack, a personalized search results page with local results. The distance from the searcher's location to the company's address is the first, and the keyword or category to which the search corresponds is his second. But his third element is also relevant: reviews and ratings.
It's getting more and more difficult. You need to have a great product, provide great service, create a great user experience, and make sure your ratings reflect that.
3. Name and Address Consistency
I live on a street called Rue Eiffel. It is named after Gustave Eiffel, who built the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately, half of the GPS system's map providers are showing Gustave as Rue Eiffel and the other half are showing him as Rue Eiffel. I've had countless issues with delivery services abandoning deliveries and taxi drivers refusing to take me home. Simply because the man was so famous that someone added his name.
The same challenges appear with local SEO. Please ensure that your company name, address, and phone number are always identical down to the last detail on all profile entries. Otherwise, your profiles will not match, search engines will receive confusing signals, and you risk not showing up in search results.
4. Local backlinks
Backlinks are one of the most important factors for SEO. Local SEO includes things like local backlinks. If you are mentioned in local business directories, local news sites, or listed on community sites related to a specific geographic location, this strengthens the locality of your business and strengthens your positioning. may be. We recommend building these backlinks as they will help strengthen your overall SEO.
5. Local keyword modifiers in content
Next, let's talk about the content of your website. As mentioned in point 3, you use your business address consistently, but you can do more. Your address belongs to an area within a town or city in your region and country. Depending on how users search for your industry, these words can be important. If you haven't done keyword research before your local SEO project, start now.
Main street names, area codes, stations, neighborhood names, town names? These words can be searched for using a keyword tool, one of the various SEO tools, or simply what comes up when you search for them in a search engine. You can also check. Then combine them with your main product or service keywords and even your brand. And make sure you have a page on your website that talks about “Pizza in Downtown Manhattan.”
Local SEO checklist
By addressing the above points, you have addressed the main tasks of local SEO. Check out the local SEO checklist below to make sure you've covered everything.
- Get and create a company profile on search engines
- Create a company profile on social networks
- Register in business directory Yellow Pages
- Build backlinks for locally focused sites
- Use your company name and address consistently on your website and elsewhere
- Use location information and keywords in website content
Local SEO focuses on customer experience
There is traditional SEO and local SEO. While it's helpful if you've done traditional SEO, local SEO is a different set of techniques that focuses on the general user experience of people you can direct to your physical location, rather than your site.
This includes creating a consistent and attractive business profile around maps and specific location-centric content. It really depends on the quality of the product or service and the experience the user gets at the location. Pay attention to that first and foremost.