Local SEO is a very significant part of digital marketing strategies when it comes to small or regionally focused businesses. While a broad approach to SEO, consisting of keyword optimization, navigability, and link building does take your website higher in the ranks on results pages, specific attention to local aspects has to be paid when it comes to local SEO. To make sure that your regionally focused target audience can find your website as soon as they search for products or services similar to what you offer, you need to follow some specific strategies. These include optimizing your website content with high-quality local citations and creating location-based content. Let us see how you can ace local SEO in more detail to form your devoted local customer base.
Get Local SEO Smart: Tips for Optimization to Attract Local Clients
Optimize your Google Business Profile
One of the first things you need to get done when it comes to local SEO is optimizing your Google My Business Profile. When customers search for any product or service near them, Google usually supplies information on results pages based on the details you have provided on this profile. This helps customers find out all the basic information about your business, like address, contact information, and services offered without having to look at your website. Hence, it is a tool for gaining local clients directly from the results pages.
Ensure that your profile includes relevant information like opening and closing hours, a short introduction to your business, and high-quality photos and videos. You can also include answers to commonly asked questions. You should also ask some of your existing customers politely to provide reviews on your profile as this helps future prospective customers visiting your profile to trust you.
Build local backlinks
While backlinks are very important for overall SEO efforts be it local or on a wider scale, building backlinks to other local sources is more important if you want to target a local customer base. Local SEO efforts in backlink building should entail browsing relevant online directories and sites in your industry to create profiles with comprehensive information related to your business. Make sure that all information in all the profiles is consistent and utilize the opportunity to get backlinks from the directories and websites to your own website.
Identify local companies and organizations from your industry that may be potentially willing to collaborate with you and contact them politely asking for backlinks from their websites. If it is beneficial to both parties, you can also offer a backlink to their website in return.
You may also consider sponsoring local events and events in your industry. Offer to conduct talks or workshops at these events representing your business. You can then take the opportunity to get backlinks from the websites of the organizers to your website. This will significantly strengthen your online presence.
Integrate local keywords in your website content
The most important aspect of local SEO is local keyword optimization. can start with thorough keyword research and identify local keywords that are relevant to your business. Incorporate these into the texts on your website, titles, and even meta descriptions to ensure maximum local visibility. Develop custom landing pages for your significant products or services that are optimized for local search. Use the local keywords in your news articles and blog posts published on the website. Link these blogs and articles to your local landing pages to ensure that visitors who read these blogs get a chance to check out your services in detail. Optimize image file names and even alt texts with local keywords.
Be active on social media
Although social media optimization is not directly related to optimizing your site for search engines, it plays a major role in getting local customers engaged with your business and thereby improving the chances of them visiting your website to check out your services in detail. Social media is a major component of local SEO as it enables you to interact with your target audience and share relevant content to strengthen customer relationships.
For this, you need to create and optimize profiles for your business on various social media platforms for your target audience to engage with. Provide them with complete information about your business with appealing images. You can attract the interest of your targeted audience by regularly posting local content, photos, and videos. Engage in active discussions and surveys to increase your company’s relevance and visibility.
Competitor analysis
A big part of local SEO success depends on your understanding of your competitors. Check which keywords your rival businesses are using in their website texts and which keywords they rank for in the local search results. Check which local directories they are listed in and what information is included in their entries. Go through their social media and see which platforms they are active on and how they are interacting with their followers. Make a survey of the kind of content posted by your competitors on their websites. Based on all these, you can then identify the strengths and weaknesses of your own campaigns in relation to those of your competitors. Using the insights you gain from your analysis of your competitors’ local SEO strategy, you can adjust your own SEO efforts to get more local visibility and attract more local customers.
Attract new customers from local influencers
Influencers usually have a local customer base built around their accounts. They can help your business reach out to its target audience and build trust for your brand among customers. Identify the influencers that are active in your industry and check whether their target audience matches yours. Make sure their values and personality align with your brand.
Some of the ways in which influencers can help improve your local SEO campaigns are –
- Promoting your products on their profiles
- Announcing coupons and discounts
- Organizing competitions using your products as prizes
- Creating text or video content promoting your company or products
- Organizing and carrying out local events to increase local visibility for your brand.