Local SEO has become more challenging and difficult as
compared to its early days when it only required the creation of a few
listings. Now, there are a number of things to be taken into consideration in
order to make a business discoverable in local search results. The things we
are talking about are concerned with categorization of local SEO strategy into
three main stages.
- Optimization of local listings and citations
- Optimization of website’s content
- Optimization of off-page factors to drive traffic into the website
These three stages are further divided into several
sub-strategies, but all those cannot be covered in a one-page article. However,
having an overview about the three would also not be any lesser than fruitful.
Optimization of local
listings and citations
If you want to rank well in local search, you cannot ignore
the power of local listings and citation websites. First of all, you need to
submit your name, address and phone number to Google Maps. That will help you
in getting your location tagged in the Google maps. Remember, you will have to
prove the legitimacy of your business in order to get tagged this way. Google
Maps and other tagging services have their own ways to verify the businesses,
so you need to comply with the requirements. Make sure that you are providing
same data to every service, because conflicting information can lead to the
information mismatch, which can be quite unfavorable for the ranking of your
business.
Besides providing name, address and phone number, you also
need to work on several other factors to make the business listing strong.
These factors include:
- URL of the website
- Short description of your business
- Long description about business
- Recent images of your business
- Business category
- Localized keywords
Optimization of the
content of your local website
When it comes to developing and optimizing content of your
website, you need to make sure that this content is quite capable to meet the
search engine’s and users’ needs.
A major aspect of optimizing a local website’s content is to
make sure that content answers ‘near me’ search queries. Some examples of such
queries include ‘restaurant new me’ or ‘Shopping Mall near me’.
If you want the content of your website to be updated on
regular basis, you can include Blog feature in the website. This way, you will
have a platform to share local news and events.
Optimization of
off-page factors to drive traffic into the website
Local SEO had been all about getting hits on the listings,
which would then encourage the users to call your business. Release of ‘Possum’
update has changed things to great extent. Now, links are the important ranking
signals for local websites. In other words, this recent update has made the
local SEO much link general SEO when it comes to off page optimization.
