The Beginner’s Guide to Local SEO — How to Boost Your Visibility and Win More Business in Your Area

Key Takeaways

• Local SEO is a powerful tool to help your ideal audience find you faster and easier by bringing you to the top of their search results.
• This article serves as a six-step guide to help you get started with local SEO.
• Start with best practices to optimize your website, understand your market, set up your Google Business Profile properly, publish local content, reach your community through offsite SEO, and continue learning to stay up to date on the most effective strategies.

Local search engine optimization (Local SEO) is one of the most important aspects of SEO strategy. For many businesses, the local community makes up most or all of their customer base. But even for larger businesses with multiple locations, local SEO is a powerful tool to help your ideal audience find you faster and easier by bringing you to the top of their search results.

Local SEO is one of the best places to get started if you’re new to SEO because it’s often much easier to achieve high search results ranking for localized queries rather than general queries. Here are the basics you need to get started:

Related: 5 top tips to turbo-charge your local SEO efforts

Start with best practices to optimize your website

Local SEO begins with the same best practices that any type of SEO uses. Before you move on to more specific strategies, make sure you’re already doing the following well:

• Your website has been set up to follow technical SEO rules, so it’s functioning well and doesn’t have any issues that would cause it to be penalized by Google’s algorithm.
• Your website is designed for both mobile and desktop users to engage easily and load quickly with alt text on all images, and those images are optimized for website performance.
• You publish valuable and interesting content and optimize it with researched keywords, title tags, and meta descriptions.
• You’re effectively using internal links.
• You use analytics tools to track your website traffic and adjust based on that data.

Understand your market

If you’re a local business, understanding your market requires you to know your local community as well as your competitors. Research in this stage is particularly important for businesses that have multiple locations and may not have a strong understanding of how the market differs in each location.

Analyze your competitors to understand what they’re doing well and where you see room for improvement. Both of these serve as valuable information you can use to improve upon what they’re doing. Start by seeing where they pop up in local search queries and visiting their websites. Do they have particular pages that perform well in the search results? If so, can you create a page that’s even better than theirs?

Next, look them up on Google Maps and view their ratings and reviews — what do people say they love about the business, and what complaints do they have?

Whatever you discover, good or bad, look for ways to improve your website and your customer experience as a whole. While you’re bound to find ways to improve your website, you may also find some tips about how to beat your competitors offline. These will ultimately benefit your website in the form of improved reviews, repeat customers, referrals, and increased traffic.

Related: Connecting With Customers Through Empathy Marketing

Make sure you’re set up to be seen locally

Google Maps and other local directories are among the primary ways customers find businesses in their area. It’s essential to build a strong brand that addresses client-centered marketing strategies. While it may seem obvious that you want to be on Google Maps, you’d be surprised how many businesses haven’t set up their Google Business Profile correctly. Sometimes, someone else may even have set it up for them!

Here’s a quick guide:

• If you haven’t set up Google Maps for your business, someone else may already have done so. Don’t worry if they have — you simply need to claim your business.
• Once you set up your Google My Business profile, fill it out in full. Include your website, phone number, business hours, and photos of your business. The more complete it is, the better. Don’t forget to keep it up to date! This information directly interacts with Google’s algorithm and will boost your website.
• Ask customers to leave a positive review for you on Google Maps. And for any reviews you receive, be sure to respond. Thank people for positive reviews, and respond politely and respectfully to negative reviews with an offer to fix any problems. Do not argue with or insult negative reviewers, as it will reflect poorly on you — prospective customers are more likely to identify with other customers and not with your business.

Once you’ve gotten set up on Google Maps, you can use Google’s My Business insights dashboard to analyze data about your leads. This can give you essential information to help you focus your SEO efforts for better results, such as which search queries led to your pages and where website traffic came from.

Related: 10 Essential Tips To Completely Optimize Your Google Business Profile