14 Point Local SEO Checklist for the Best Local SEO Strategy
April 18, 2019
Sarvesh Bagla
Local SEO has never been as important as it is in current times. While location-based SEO was always something that was a part of the optimization exercise, the kind of special focus and attention that it has generated in recent times has led to special efforts being directed towards leveraging it for maximum gains. In this article we discuss, how in the context of SEO, better visibility and online presence can be achieved by businesses. Some tips and guidelines are being offered on how to implement processes and strategies to get the most out of location-based results.
Thanks to the attention it has been getting from Google in the last year, SEO has seen come to the forefront in a big way. In the past, it was more of a domain that was restrictively being explored by smaller and medium-sized businesses. That trend is changing fast.
Local SEO has grown exponentially in relevance and importance even in this past given year and there are two big reasons for that. One is the fact that more and more searches are being conducted on mobile devices now and in that context, location is a big factor. The second is the fact that Google itself has been giving a lot of importance to organic results even for desktop searches.
So, the big question is- how does a business leverage this trend? What are the steps that can be taken in order to gain visibility and maximize online presence? Below we’ve compiled a local SEO checklist that is beneficial in the upcoming times.
Complete Local SEO Checklist:
#1 Mobile Friendliness
In the current scenario, an excellent mobile experience with a responsive design and structure is a must for any website. Google’s search index is mobile-first and it penalises websites not optimised for mobile. Ensure that your site is fully mobile-friendly in order to take advantage of mobile search traffic, which accounts for 62% of all time spent on digital media. These mobile searchers are often aimed at searching for specific types of businesses with a high intent to convert.
Experts Insights for Mobile Friendliness
“Some 30% of mobile searches are location-related.. So it’s vital that your site is optimized for mobile devices. Also, 76% of local searches result in a phone call.”
— Neil Patel, neilpatel.com
“Local search and mobile search go hand in hand (nine out of ten smartphone users conduct searches on their devices!).”
— blog.hubspot.com
“Make sure that your website is optimized for mobile visitors, as 61% of mobile searchers are more likely to contact a business if they have a mobile‐friendly site.”
— ahrefs.com
#2 Keyword Research
Every great SEO strategy includes {a lot of} keyword research – thinking through what your audience is searching for. As a business, adding geo-modifiers to a keyword to make it location specific is extremely helpful such as, ‘interior decorators in New Delhi’ or ‘salons in Birmingham’ or ‘grocery stores near me’. Specifying distinct areas is helpful, as they attract audiences with a higher intent. Use tools such as Google’s keyword planner, wordstream, and ubersuggest to discover the keywords to rank for.
Experts Insights for Keyword Research for local business
“Google has been working toward producing more localized search results. A few years ago, search engines would yield the same results for people running the same search in Arizona as they would in California. Since then, Google has taken a more local-first approach when ranking search results. It favors businesses with a listing in proximity to the person conducting the search. It’s not just on the basis of location that they’re tailoring their search results. They’re also accounting for your personal choices and preferences.”
— searchenginejournal.com
“Local SEO is a great strategy for small businesses and service industries that primarily market in a set geographic area. By focusing content on keywords and intent, you effectively narrow the competition and your reach to your target audience. Smart!”
— searchengineland.com
#3 Google My Business Listings
One of the easiest steps that can be, in fact need to be taken, is to have a Google My Business listing, which increasingly is no longer an option. Having a Google My Business listing will tremendously boost your online search visibility and is exactly what Google uses for map driven search results.
Experts Insights for Google My Business Listing
“40% of all mobile searches coming to Google are local in nature at this point, which continues to trend upward. As such, the search giant also announced that “physical location” or the proximity of a business to a user’s location will become a targeting variable when serving ads to mobile users.”
— mobilemarketingwatch.com
“The beauty of Google Places is that it is essentially democratic and designed to give the true business owner the edge over larger corporations who may have a outlet or presence but are not locally based.”
— Googleplacesoptimization.org
“Consumers can also seek out businesses by searching within Google itself. A search on Google’s social network will return only Google My Business pages, so your page doesn’t have to compete with traditional websites and ads that appear in a regular Web search.”
— Brett Nuckles, Businessnewsdaily.com
#4 NAP [Name, Address, & Phone] /Business Directories Promotion
One of the most significant steps that need to be taken for greater visibility is to make sure that your contact details i.e. NAP information is correct and very specific, both, onsite and as well as externally at other places like business directories etc on the web [Learn here about- Techmagnate’s Business Listings services]. The idea is to establish a clear and strong relationship between the business and the location they would like to target.
Experts Insights for NAP
“Search engines typically pull information from business listing sites – Yelp, TripAdvisor®, and others — and display them under your website address for search results.”
— godaddy.com
“Thanks to the rising popularity and usefulness of smartphones, people are increasingly interested in finding businesses that offer what they want nearby.”
— wix.com
The searches conducted for businesses tend to be more specific. When a person is searching on mobile, they query that they put in is more location specific and keeping that in mind mobile searches have to be more comprehensive in their optimization. It is imperative that a clear and working phone number accompanies your search result so that a user is able to reach out to you immediately.
#5 Positive Reviews and Feedback
Reviews and feedback go a long way in establishing the credibility and visibility of your business online. In fact entering a review for your business is a feature that a number of online directories are offering nowadays. Search engines are fond of reviews and use them for additional weight when ranking your site.
Experts Insights for Reviews and Feedback in Local Listing
“The fact is, many free online business directories might be displaying your business reviews today without you even knowing it, and often, the information is inaccurate. Your customers might already be writing reviews about your business on these review websites and potential customers are reading them. You need to find, claim and verify your business information on these directories.”
— in.godaddy.com
“Assuming you’ve taken advantage of Google+ Local to increase your search visibility, positive reviews will help turn that visibility into new business. Positive reviews are powerful drivers for converting clicks into customers.”
–Jay Taylor, searchenginewatch.com
“Google makes it easy for users to find similar businesses nearby, so positive reviews on your Google+ page can help your brand stand out. The higher customers rate your business, the more clicks your page is likely to receive. You can’t control what every customer thinks, but you can encourage satisfied customers to log on and leave a star rating or review. You can also take the time to leave a polite, professional response to negative reviews.”
–Brett Nuckles, businessnewsdaily.com
#6 Add State/City Name in Meta Tags
This part is pretty self-explanatory, but deems repetition. Remember to use keywords as part of the content and Meta tags on your site. Trust us, it’s common sense.
Experts Insights for State/City Name in Meta Tags
“Local SEO is a series of signposts that allow the robots to understand where you are in the world and what you’re providing. It allows them to better rank your site according to the search terms the user enters.”
— Dashburst.com–Chris Simmance
Mentioning your location in the text of your site or even possibly adding your address to the footer and tagging it with the relevant schema/ mark-up will help.
Experts Insights for Schema/Markup on Footer
“Markup and microformats are becoming extremely important to rankings. Schema.org was created last year to create a common language between major search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo that identifies types of content given to search engines via websites. We are just on the cusp of the possibilities with schema, but the reality is, if you don’t start now, you’re going to be behind.”
— Carrie Hill, searchenginewatch.com
#8 Publish Original, Informative In-Depth Content
So clearly, the content bit is not going away. Content isn’t an intangible, amorphous cloud that’s quickly finding a place in jargon. It’s a means for you to provide real solutions and value for your audience, and is equally pertinent for your SEO efforts as it is for your other SEO and Digital Marketing activity.
After the Hummingbird update, meaningful content is fast becoming a more consistent and weighted factor for SEO. Remember to answer the Who, How, What, Where, When and Whyaspects in all of your writing. Also, add links to your internal pages for more detailed information.
Experts Insights for Role of Content in Local Business
“Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words; it may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that ‘place’ means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that ‘iPhone 5s’ is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words. In particular, Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words.”
So, clearly, it’s back to the basics, folks. Clarity in communication and great writing skills will help you get much further ahead than most of your technical skills combined.
Isolation never helps, and for business, it only spells disaster! Consider sponsoring or being an active participant of events in your community. Why take the pain? Well, it has a twofold benefit to it.
The prime being the strong network that you create for your business and of course, the secure links that your business obtains from the businesses, the press and media therein, that comes complementary. Oh yes it does entail an investment of resources (time, manpower and money) but it pays off eventually!
Experts Insights for Sponsoring Local Events
“If you’re a bootstrapped startup that can’t front the cash to get your logo in the sponsor column of an event, consider trading your services for that sponsorship instead. For instance, at Killer Infographics we traded our design services for a permanent sponsorship link AND free tickets to the Snoho Brewfest.”
–Amy Balliett, searchenginepeople.com
#10 Local Image Promotion
A great source for links and citations can be social media sites that lend weightage to images and photographs, for instance, Facebook, Pinterest, Flickr and perhaps even Instagram. These sites carry a healthy amount of influence with regards to rankings (think ubiquity) and offer an opportunity for brands to gain an edge over their competitors.
Get more tips for Images Promotion and optimize your images for better SERP ranks.
Experts Insights for Local Image Promotion
“If you geocode your images in some way, it gives Google and other search engines high confidence that the content should be associated with a particular place.”
–Chris Silver Smith, searchengineland.com
#11 Promotional YouTube Videos
Businesses generally invest in an informative video that makes people aware of their evolution and services. A think-out-of-the-box idea would be if you could publish a series of videos that would show the kind of work you do and how you do it. Ensure you highlight the unique practices you adopt to make your services score better. The benefit? While the gains may not be tangible at the onset, it would help showcase your business’ expertise and may land you many prospective leads that would willingly pay you to get the work done.
Get more tips for video and why to start video marketing for better SERP ranks.
Experts Insights for YouTube Videos
“A recent Hitwise report indicates that usage of Google Maps increased significantly as a result of more visibility from Universal Search. Another long-running, high-performing vertical at Google is Image Search—until the acquisition of YouTube, Image Search was Google’s second most-visited property. So, leveraging a combination of optimizations for both search and image search could provide some beneficial synergies.”
–Chris Silver Smith, searchengineland.com
#12 A webpage for each store location
Businesses could have multiple store locations within a city or in different cities. Google’s Matt Cutts suggests separate web pages (URLs) or a single page with links to the different store locations be created for many or few outlets respectively. A separate URL for different store locations will help consumers find store specific information with ease. Additionally, Google’s crawler can index the pages separately too.
Get more tips to promote multiple stores for better SERP ranks.
Additional Read: Local SEO for Multiple Locations
Experts Insights for having location-specific pages on the website
“This is the advice I’ve tried so hard to give franchises I work with, but they frequently will not listen. The “find a location” tools do not allow for static page creation. So I wrote software to grab the data and build HTML pages – big, big improvement especially in placement.”
–Scott Clark, buzzmaven.com
Additional Information: Location page seo
#13 Connect social pages to enhance SERP rankings
Though Google has denied the effect of popularity on Facebook and Twitter in SERP rankings, it still works well. If you have a high Facebook and Twitter following, and if you get them integrated on your website, your SERP rankings are bound to progress. Off late, proactively involving on Google+ especially, can highly improve search rankings.
Experts Insights for social pages in Local SEO
“Google+ is almost an open invitation by Google to determine what should be given priority in search results”
–Sarvesh Bagla, CEO, Techmagnate
“If your tweet content that gets a decent amount of RTs, aka “good content” that in turn can generate links back to your site from other sites that post the tweets.”
–Andrew Shotland, LocalSEOGuide.com
#14 Keyhole Markup Language (KML)
Feature your business locations on Google and Bing Maps by using the KML file format. As a rich data source, it not only points to your operation units but also adds value and credibility to your brand image.
Businesses don’t become global overnight. It has to begin from the smaller community to the larger (global) community. SEO is important if you want to ground your roots firmly. It’s only when people around you know you well, that the information gets disseminated further.
Experts Insights for KML
“Google will use the information from the KML (and the Business Center) to mix and match this with all the other information they already scraped from the net and your KML with location information in it is now an authenticated source”
— martijnbeijk.com
You can locate Techmagnate, one of the leading SEO company in Delhi
FAQs
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How can I do local SEO?
Some best practices SEO include:Optimise for Google My Business and directory listings
Make sure your web site is mobile-friendly as most searches happen on mobile
Focus your keyword research on search terms
Optimise your website content – add location in meta tags and footer
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How does local SEO work?
SEO helps businesses promote their products and services to local prospects and audience. To gather information for search, search engines rely on signals such as content, social profile pages, links, and citations to provide the most relevant results to the user.
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Why is local SEO important?
SEO helps you:
- Build online visibility
- Reach prospects near your location
- Gain footfalls and sales
- Improve your brand reputation
- Improve voice search SEO
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What is Google local listing in SEO?
Google listings are the business listings that show up on the map on the first page of a Google search result. You can do this managing your Google My Business page.
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How do I optimize Google local listings?
To optimise your GoogleMyBusiness listing – set up your page with a relevant category and populate it with great images, your phone number and information. Encouraging reviews and optimising your own web site for SEO will help optimise your listings.