Local SEO for Beginners: How to Get Started

Local SEO can increase the visibility of your business in the online domain which will ultimately increase the footfall physically. By doing local SEO for your business you can get an upper hand on your local competitors.  The smallest of businesses like restaurants, grocery stores, medical shops, doctor's clinics can also get benefitted from local SEO. An impactful local SEO needs a combination of things like geo-targeted optimization, business listings, backlinks, content marketing, and user-generated reviews. All these are discussed in the sections to follow.

What Exactly is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is a method by which your online content gets listed on the top results of the search engines for any particular keyword. The SEO aims to improve the visibility of your business to the intended customers. The local SEO is an even more concentrated way of doing it. For local SEO one needs to concentrate on the users of a specific area.

Business Listings and Social Media Pages:

 

There are various search engines available nowadays but Google is the most popular name amongst all. Google My Business is one of the most popular and common listing websites. But there are various other options available as well like Binge, Yahoo, and Yelp, etc.

No matter where you list our business, it is important to keep our business pages up to date.

It is also required to keep giving updates on the social media pages of the organization.

 

Need to optimize the website for local customers:

 

Most of the technical requirements of local SEO are the same as traditional SEO, but local SEO has some specific elements as well such as contact information, operating hours, hyperlinking the local keywords, etc. Any business organization should compulsorily mention their operating hours and contact information on their business websites. Similarly, all the keywords or phrases having the location of the business should be present in title tags or the descriptions. You can even hyperlink the keywords which will give even more targeted results.

 

Content Marketing for Local Markets:

Content marketing plays an important role in all the local SEO campaigns. This can be done by creating such contents which are relevant to your location and business and identifying and creating advocates of your brand who can promote your brand on different social media

Effective Citations:

As much as the backlinks are important for any SEO, citations are equally or even more important. Citation is the mention of the brand name on third party websites. Those citations play a key role in the local SEO campaigns.

Customer Reviews:

Customer Reviews play a very vital role in local SEO. You can integrate these customer reviews on the business website and social media pages to get the maximum benefit. Remember positive customer reviews can only be achieved by quality products and excellent service.

Conclusion:

Since most of the searches nowadays have done through mobiles therefore the businesses need to adapt to local SEO. It not only increases the footfall on your website but also makes you geographically relevant.