How to Improve Your Local SEO – Quick Guide 2021

Probably, you already know that the main reason for using Search Engine Optimization or SEO, is to attract more traffic to a website and therefore, increase its sales.

But, did you know that about 50% of the searches that users make on Google are related to the local sphere?

That means that if you have a physical business and you aren’t applying a good local SEO strategy to your website, you’re missing a great opportunity to get more clients.

By applying an optimized SEO strategy to your site, you’ll make it appear to a greater number of potential customers within your area of influence.

Since we want to help you, today, we’ll teach you how to improve your local SEO right now through some tips and tactics that we’ve prepared for you to become an expert on the subject. Ready?

Why local SEO?

SEO is a technique used to increase the visibility of a physical business website based on its geographic location. In this case, the location is essential, and you should always keep that in mind in every SEO action you perform.

Bear in mind that many times, the intention of a website or blog is to promote a product or service that a certain group of consumers are looking for in a specific geographical area.

Now, it no longer matters whether you have a small business or a large company since as with normal SEO, you not only need to be found, but you must also stand out above your competition.

The above is relevant if we consider that local SEO is still a pending issue among most businesses and companies, so if you optimize your website to the max level, so that it appears in the first positions of local searches, you’ll already be obtaining a huge competitive advantage.

10+ tips to improve your local SEO

Now that you know that you must resort to local SEO to attract a greater number of customers and increase your sales, we’re going to indicate the most important points to optimize your strategy as much as possible.

1.- NAP goes first

NAP (Name, Address, Phone) is the first point that you should keep in mind to improve your local SEO. Every time you register your website in a directory or create a new profile, you should always put this data in the same way, without any variation.

This is because Google tracks this information on your website, online directories, and industry-related pages. If you change something in the contact information, even just a comma, you’ll confuse Google, and you’ll be losing points in its ranking.

2.- Identify what your prospects are looking for

If you want to improve the positioning of your website, the next thing is to do a Google search for the keywords for which you want to position your business. Search using phrases where keywords appear, so you can know where your business is positioned and what other businesses are competing with you.

What is your competition doing well that you aren’t?

And if you were a potential customer of your business, what keyword would you use to perform a search?

3.- Social media is very useful

Social networks play an increasingly important role in local SEO, so you must optimize your business profiles and interact constantly to gain followers, opinions, and reputation. The better your content ranks, the better for your SEO.

A good practice is that in each new social profile that you create, you add links to your other profiles and to your website.

Also try to choose the social networks that best suit your type of business, you don’t necessarily need to have a presence in all of them.

4.- Search a domain with your keywords

If you’re still in the process of creating your website, it’s very important that when looking for a suitable domain for your business, you create one from the essence of it.

Consider that if your business is local and has a particular feature related to its location or product/service, you can make it more relevant in Google if you naturally include your type of business and its location in the domain name itself, something like: www.bagsinnewyork.com.

This will give your business a very strong boost for the keywords “bags in New York.”

5.- Include the name of your city in your titles

If you want to position your business as a shoe distributor in New York, for example, you must let Google know that. This means that you should try to include those keywords in your titles and descriptions.

Even so, you should be careful because if Google finds out that you’re abusing keywords, it’ll penalize you. That’s why it’s best to include your keywords in a natural way and not too forced in your content.

6.- Ask your customers for reviews

In local SEO, it’s very important to try and make your customers part of your digital community. It’s a key task to convince them to leave their opinions on Google My Business because they’ll appreciate it, according to some statistics.

If you have a marketing agency CRM you can send an email and offer discounts on the next purchase to all customers who have left their review, just to give an example. However, don’t forget that it’s just as important to respond to as many of those comments as possible. This will help strengthen your community.

7.- Use Google Maps

Did you know that many of the local business searches aren’t done on Google, but on Google Maps?

In this case, your mobile device plays an essential role, since it’s what potential customers use the most to find the location and perform proximity searches. This means that users who find your business on Google Maps are potential visitors to it. That’s why it’s so important to have all the information updated, including pics of your business.

Also, don’t forget to insert the map where your business appears on Google Maps on your web page. You just have to search for it in Maps and copy the HTML code that appears there to share it on your website.

8.- Include the link to your website everywhere

Google gives great importance to the number of external links that point to your website — which is known as link building.

This is reinforced if your anchor text — the text where the link is included — has the name of your business and its location.

The more authority you have and the closer to your business the business where you place your links, the greater the importance that Google will give to those links.

9.- Take advantage of your pics and videos

If you make tutorials to show how your stuff works, take pictures of the activity of your store and/or generate virtual catalogs, you could use all that content as your ally to improve your local positioning.

YouTube is one of the most used search engines in the world and it also belongs to Google, so you can enter your keywords in your videos to get an additional boost in your local SEO.

Finally, try adding the location of your business in the metadata of your images, as this will make Google’s job much easier.

10.- Work on the SEO on-page of your website

Although it is important that you focus on positioning your business for local searches, you shouldn’t forget that even if your SEO is local, it is still SEO.

This means that you must:

  • Monitor the loading speed of your web
  • Create a clean architecture of the entire site
  • Make correct use of keywords
  • Redirect pages to avoid 404 and 301 errors
  • Optimize your content strategy

And more…

BONUS TIP

11.- Stay updated

Google doesn’t like stagnant pages with poor content, so it’ll position them below other websites that do meet its requirements.

You should take some time to adjust your old content and add new content to your website and your Google MyBusiness profile. It’s important that Google detects this activity and that you also manage to adapt that content to new SEO techniques, new interesting keywords or anything that helps you improve.

Also, remember that Google MyBusiness can give you a good amount of information about the activity of your website and users.

As you can see, local SEO can take as much work as organic SEO. That is why it’s worth taking your time to develop a strategy appropriate to your needs.

With the tips that we have given you in this guide, you’ll increase customer visits as well as purchases of your products and services, and with no doubt, you’ll notice the difference.