Be A Local Superstar: Improve Your Business Website’s Local SEO

As we’ve mentioned before, local SEO is one of the most important digital marketing techniques for small-to-medium businesses looking to make an impact on their nearby community. While there are subtle differences between general SEO and local SEO, the intended result should be the same: make your business’ website one of the top results (if not #1) on search engines whenever someone looks for keywords related to your business.

Aside from the usual SEO techniques, there are also a few other ways that you can optimize your website and turn your business into a local superstar (in terms of search result rankings, that is!) that everyone in your community will flock to.

Start With Your Homepage

Think of your business website as an online calling card, and your homepage is the front of that card. All relevant information about you, your business, and what you do (and why you’re their best choice!) should be on the homepage: business name, contact details, a general summary of your products and/or services, and customer testimonials, among other things. Make these succinct, but informative, and dial down on the fancy graphics.

Now for the technical stuff: make sure that all your Meta data reflects the content on your webpage. That means your page title tag, headers, and especially your Meta descriptions, should be aligned to the kind of content on the page they’re placed on. Remember: the more professional your website looks, the more legitimate it looks to potential clients which, in turn, make you more trustworthy.

Get Your Meta Data In Order

Some analysts have opened the discussion about the relevancy of Meta data, particularly meta descriptions and page title tags and whether one trumps the other, in ranking factors. Regardless of which side of the Meta discussion you’re on, what everyone can agree on is this: well-worded, accurate, and informative Meta data goes a long way in making your page look professional, trustworthy, and legitimate.

When it comes to optimizing your page for local SEO, it’s crucial to have page title tags that contain both the name of your city or town in addition to your business name and/or your products and services. Not only does this make it easier for people to find you in a region, it also tells them what your business is all about.

Pay Attention to Detail

While it might be tempting to consolidate all your business information into a single page, this isn’t advisable. First of all, it clutters up your website and, almost counter-intuitively, makes it harder for people to find the information they want about you or your products/services. Secondly, from an SEO standpoint, this makes it all the more difficult for your page to rank, which makes it disastrous for local SEO, where you’re competing with very similar and very specific businesses in the same area.

Not only does giving your products, services, and business information their own optimized page give your website a comprehensive sitemap for the Google spiders to crawl, it also helps local searchers find specific information about specific products/services in a specific location. This, in turn, gives your site the edge over the competition, especially since top ranking results are almost always the first (and, in some cases, the only) website that people check.

Individualized pages that contain specific locations helps you mark your territory and provides that location with a trusted site for people to visit. The more often your business’ website comes up in searches, the more trusted you become, and the more of a household name you become. Read more about individualized pages in this example.

Be Part of the Local Directory

One of the most time-consuming tasks in local SEO, getting your business listed in local directory listings is a great way to build citations. Citation building is another tool that businesses can use to create a strong online presence and rank higher in search results. However, citation building will only work if the pages you’re listing and citing follow the exact same formatting as in your webpage, your Google MyBusiness Page (an essential tool for SEO), and in your local directories.

Get On Social Media

In the early days of social media, many people laughed at the idea of having a business page on Facebook or Instagram, seeing it as exercises in vanity. But in the digital world, and with more than half the population using some form of social media, having a business page on a social media platform is essential to your business’ survival.

Provide social media signals that direct people to your location. This is a huge bonus for ranking in local SEO. The best part? Creating a social media page and maintaining a social media presence require little to no effort, with the page’s existence alone generating a signal for people to follow. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt if your page had a social media strategy that will help you stay relevant, but the act of creating one already puts you on the radar.

If you don’t have a Facebook business page, you should now. Having social media signals pointing to your location is another bonus when it comes to ranking for local SEO. You don’t necessarily have to do a lot with it, but the sheer existence of the page is better than nothing. However, ideally you’ll have a social media strategy that will help you to manage content for multiple locations, if that’s relevant to your business.

Maintain SEO Best Practices

Finally, never forget to maintain general SEO best practices. As long as you have an online presence, ensuring that your site is optimized for search, both general and local, is the best way to drive online traffic which, in turn, can be converted to potential leads. Remember: any advantage you get is a good one, so take it!. You can also get sound SEO and internet marketing training by visiting https://www.traffictsunami.com/