Local Search is always a great investment for your marketing strategy. After all, you want to make sure customers can actually find your brick and mortar location!Captialising on digital marketing for your physical location may seem a little confusing, however, it’s very easy with our top 8 ways to start optimising for local search below.
Local Search Optimisiation for your Homepage
Your homepage should have all the primary information your customers need on it in a readily accessible way. This will make it easier for your customers to find the information about your business that they need. Also, it will make it easy for Google to understand these particular elements too.The easiest way to do this is to use a header tag and meta description.
2. Meta Data helping Local Search
Meta data has been a topic of debate over recent years. Some marketers believe that meta data is redundant now, yet some still believe that it is very relevant to your business.Either way, meta data makes it easy for search engines to find the primary information they need from your business. Meta data also enables you to focus on optimising your local SEO, such as the city or region you want your business to be focused on.
3. Creating New pages for Local Search
Consolidating information isn’t very helpful for local SEO unfortunately. The best way to optimise your website is for individual products or services to have their own individual pages.This is the best practice for overall SEO as well as painting a clearer sitemap for search engines too. If you have multiple locations, creating an individual page for each location is good practice too. This is because it will more likely show up on search results with individual pages devoted to individual locations.
4. Claim your GMB Page for Local Search
Claiming your Google My Business page is such an important part of your marketing strategy. Filling out the content you need for your business listing is essential to your local SEO strategy, especially for Google Pack and SERP results. Using keywords whilst filling out these GMB listings is essential as it counts for 20% of your chance of getting into the Local Pack.Make sure you claim each location you have for each of your GMB’s.
5. Updated NAP Citations
Consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) across all of your listings as well as your website is essential. This is because the more consistent the layout, the code for the footer will still load for each page to have its true effect.Vicinus can help you with that! You can manage business listings from a central platform. Vicinus provides real-time management of all your locations from one easy-to-use platform. It will help customers find only up-to-date and consistent information about your brand.
6. Local Directories for Local Search
This one is such an effective way of optimising for local search. Although it can be time consuming to build these citations manually, they are such an important part of local SEO.Making sure that every listing is exactly the same as the previous one (as touched upon above) is necessary, so make sure that you mirror the exact format every single time.
7. Social Media Signals
Firstly, make sure that you have set up business pages for your company. These social media signals which point your customer in the direction of your business help with your ranking for local SEO.Updating it is best, however, the existence of pages like this can help too. Ideally, your social media strategy will help manage your content for multiple locations.
8. Reviews for Local Search
Reviews are and have always been, a priority for your business. Making sure that these reviews are available to your potential customer’s work to build trust in your business.Not only just for customers but for search engines too, reviews can help with ranking. Search engines look at a number of factors when ranking websites for certain search inquiries, which means that reviews will always be of help.
