Let's start off the Pt 1 on Local SEO: On-Page
We will discuss each block at length and see how you can develop deep-focus local SEO strategies and tactics to bring everything in order.
Improving organic rankings, improving the local search visibility, skyrocketing click-through rates and in general driving favourable actions through the roof, it's all a matter of experience and expertise.
A. On-Page Local SEO
If you are familiar with the basics of general SEO, you shouldn't have too much trouble understanding this point. Even if you aren't, do stick with me, this is the most interesting part of every local SEO project.
On-page SEO has one job ,“ Grab a share of organic traffic for relevant, closely related search terms through various content assets."
So, what sort of content should a local business really have?
Here's a quick, generalised content scheme that most local businesses use:
Home Page (the first-choice landing page): Works for businesses across the board.
Contact Page (the second-choice landing page): Works if you want to generate instant leads. For example, the website for a home improvement business can lead people directly to the 'Contact Us' page.
Service Pages (the third-choice landing pages): If you want to close pre-sold leads, this is the way to go. For example, a restaurant website can lead visitors to the 'Today's Menu' page.
Offers, Promotions, Events (the fourth-choice landing pages): I wouldn't recommend using these as landing pages in local SEO. Keep them handy for social media and other marketing efforts.
Content Marketing: Blog, News, Videos & Other Assets (the complementary landing pages): These will be incidental landing pages. Much of the traffic that these generate will be organic so you need to put in additional conversion machinery to make them count.
Regardless of whether your business is hyperlocal or national, most pages and posts on your website will fall under one of these heads.
One quick point to avoid any confusion: we won't be talking here about optimizing your lead magnets or improving the lead flow. Our aim here is to work towards winning more organic clicks by optimizing on-page local SEO ranking factors.
1. Optimize The Landing Page
In most cases, the home page is going to be the default landing page. What I mean by the landing page here is this:
Don't confuse this with any other landing pages in your marketing campaigns. Unless specified otherwise, a local SEO landing page is your Google My Business landing page.
2. The Title
It's not enough to just put the name of your business in the title of the landing page. You need to add more local context to it.
As of today, a good way to structure the website title is as follows:
We're trying to achieve two things here: contextual and locational relevance.
A service/product keyword in the title followed by some locational context sets your home page nicely.
Don't forget to wrap your titles in a correct title tag.
Without this tag, Google can't really understand what your page is all about.
Most Content Management Systems will do this automatically for you. If you're outsourcing the design to an external developer, make sure they follow the best on-page SEO practices.
Here's one question I get asked a lot:
I see people using the city/area name right in their business name. Isn't that overoptimization?
Yes, it is. The difference is subtle here, you should use a locational modifier (city/area) in the title on YOUR website.
When you actually add it as your 'Business Name' in the GMB listing, it just looks crass, spammy and weird unless of course that's your actual business name.
3. The Content
There are quite a few factors that go into the making of good content. The fundamentals of good content are the same for local business websites. As far as the landing page is concerned, you need to be extra careful in establishing:
Relevancy
Very, very important. The content on your landing page must be relevant to your business, to your location, to your GMB listing and in general to what wins you most clicks.
Any disconnect will make people bounce, telling Google your website isn't really relevant to those keywords. Going a step further, make sure that every piece of content across your website follows this.
Volume
This is a delicate matter. The quality of the content is rarely dependent upon its length, but that doesn't mean you can get away with a landing page that has a couple of sentences here and there.
Aim to develop your landing page in a natural fashion and worry about the word count only when it's too low (less than 300, for example) or astonishingly high (anything above 5,000).
When it comes to blog posts and other content marketing assets, you don't really need to worry about the upper limit. For reference, a well-performing blog post takes about 7-10 minutes to read (1,500 to 2,500 words).
Tags
This is quite basic but still needs to be reiterated. All your content must follow the general SEO best practices. This means:
Using heading tags wisely.
Adding appropriate alt-text to all images.
Adding helpful, SEO-ready meta details to each page and post.
Using localized URLs without overoptimizing.
4. The NAP Details (A Local SEO Must-Have)
The NAP details which include name, address and phone number are non-negotiables for every local business SEO effort.
Here's the best way to go about this:
The Business Name
As I pointed out earlier, the business name should always be the name that's on your business cards. If I were to run a Tom's BBQ in London, "Tom's BBQ" will do just fine there's no need to overoptimize and go for "Tom's BBQ in London."
Important
You can be a little adventurous with your titles and URLs – but not with NAP. This is because Google will pick up NAP details when you use structured data markups. In this case, the title of my website can well be – Tom’s BBQ – 24×7 BBQ Restaurant in London. But the schema-fied business name MUST be Tom’s BBQ.
The Address
The address should be precise, accurate and in the right local format.
The Phone Number
It's quite likely that you have multiple phone numbers that people use to get in touch with you. While I understand the need for this, stick to using just one number that is present all over the internet: on your website, citations and the GMB listing.
This will avoid any potential conflict that can lower your localized search rankings. Moreover, having multiple entries will only confuse your potential customers. If you must, create a separate contact page to list other phone numbers.
3 out 4 local searches result in phone calls. If you aren't doing this right, you're literally making money for your competitors. We don't want to do that so, be sure to employ the simple "Click to Call" code on your landing page.
It’s a simple markup – all you have to do is wrap your phone numbers with the universal telephone schema.
The Location
To go with the address, consider embedding a visual map location on your landing page. This quickly tells the visitor where you exactly are.
Again, it's not overly difficult and can give your UX and engagement a great edge. For seamless integration with your GMB listing and better local search SEO results, stick to Google Maps.
The NAP Schema
While we usually reserve schema for technical SEO, it makes a lot of sense to include it right here. The beauty of local SEO is that you don't always need to get people to actually visit your website.
As long as Google shows the important details (read: the NAP details) directly in SERPs, you are all set. To feature these details as rich snippets, you need to adopt the best schema practices (the "Click to Call" is one).
Wrap all the important details in a way that's prescribed here, and Google will extract and display these directly in SERPs.
To future-proof your website, employ proper structured data markup across your website.
How to Validate Your NAP Schema?
Once you have implemented on-page NAP schema, it’s important to validate it to remove any inadvertent coding issues. You can use Google’s structured data testing tool for this purpose.
The Footer and the Contact Page
If your "Contact Us" page isn't the landing page, be sure to include the NAP details here all over again, in the same way.
If you can't embed the map link on to your landing page, the contact page is the best candidate for it. Here’s how we add our NAP details to the footer of our website:
The NAP details should also be present in the footer of your website so that people can quickly get in touch with you regardless of the page they are on.
5. The Keywords
Ah, the keywords.
We keep talking about keywords quite frequently on our blog. As far local SEO tactics go, you need to be on your toes all the time because the competition is real and fierce.
No better place to find this out the hard way than the keyword research.
Here's what you need to keep in mind while carrying out the keyword research to boost your local SEO efforts:
Focus on local search modifiers:
The landing page should be optimized for business + local keywords.
Reverse engineering keywords from successful local competitors can yield fast results.
Start from micro-niche keywords and build towards major, high-volume, high competition keywords.
Exploit keyword gaps, use long tail keywords and terms wisely, maintain the natural flow of language.
It's impossible to discuss all the nuances of keyword research here. Just keep this in mind creative, result-driven keyword research is never going to lose you money.
If this interests you, here's a glimpse into our advanced keyword research strategy.
6. Local Content Marketing And Digital PR
There only reason for this the value is it adds to your website.
Then again, do it without a strategy and all your marketing budget goes for a toss. Content marketing, when done right, really has no upper limit to the ROIs it provides especially for local businesses.
Most local SEO guides seem to ignore this point and I can see why. It's a time-consuming process. That, however, is no reason to chuck a potential windfall out of the window!
From the local SEO point of view, here's what your content marketing efforts should do:
Build topical, relevant and interesting content assets,
Promote on-page engagement and sharing,
Provide consistent value to the visitor,
Generate leads (your landing page will generate intent-driven, hot leads, while your content assets will usually generate warm leads that you can convert with a little bit of nudging),
Ultimately, boost conversions.
Any local content asset you create that ticks all these boxes will ultimately boost your local SEO on a consistent basis. Here's how:
Let's say you run a local dog care and grooming business in Boston. You want to create a content piece for the target audience: dog owners in Boston. What ideas come to your mind?
Here's how our latest dog grooming service helps your dog.
Nope. Doesn't click with Boston. Sounds like an ad, too.
10 benefits of grooming for your Chihuahua's health.
Good, will work with dog owners, but lacks the Boston angle (Put it in the pipeline, anyway).
It's the coldest December in Boston since 1964. 10 grooming tips to keep your dog warm, happy & cuddly!
Sign me up!
If I am a dog owner in Boston, I'd not only click on it, I'd send it to people I know will be interested in reading, and probably share it on my Facebook, too.
If the content itself is top-notch, it will be worth linking back to for other websites, as well. So, we'll hope that local blogs, dailies and magazines pick it up. If not, you can always proactively reach out to them (digital PR).
Creating diverse, unique, original and absolutely kick-ass content will never ever hurt your business it will only provide great returns on every marketing dollar. Consistency, relevancy and discipline are the keys to success, as we have discussed in our SEO content strategy guide.
Note: Our good friends and partners at HQSEO wrote this piece. You can find the original version of the post linked here.
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