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Local SEO is important because people who live in your area will likely include the location in their search, because they want to call a tradie or visit a store locally. It’s a great way to compete against the big nationals and multinationals who don’t have a local presence.
If you aren’t sure whether this type of SEO will be of benefit to your business, you can get a free ROI estimate here – free local SEO estimate.
So how do you optimise your business to help the locals find you?
Get your business on Google maps
The way to do this is to claim your free Google My Business page, which will make your business visible when people search online for your services or products in the local area (it’s mobile friendly). This will also make your site appear on Google Maps. Once Google validates your business however, you also have a good chance of it showing in the sidebar of the search page (great for visibility).
You can also load your business details to other directories such as Yelp, Foursquare, YellowPages, etc., to further increase your local visibility. Don’t forget to ask customers to leave reviews on your website or on these local directories, because good reviews encourage more locals to shop at your store.
Engage your local audience
One of the best ways to encourage traffic to your website and improve your local SEO is to write content about local events, news, sports or other interesting issues. You can do this in your blog by writing a post, create a video about an event you are sponsoring or design a landing page, specifically for locals living in your area (great if you cover more than one suburb).
Check out voice search
Voice search is set to take off over the next few years, so you will need to consider keywords that people speak, rather than type into the search engines. This means that long tail keywords in the form of questions will become more powerful for local SEO purposes, so check it out and start optimising for voice search as soon as possible.
Research local SEO keywords
Do some research on local keywords (you can check out the Google Planner) and see which keywords are relevant for your area. These can be keywords that are related to your products or services, even to local landmarks or events, and pepper them throughout your content. You can also create landing pages for each of your products or services, using a selection of local and long tailed keywords, helping these pages to become more visible to searchers.
Create good quality local backlinks
Search engines love good quality backlinks, so it pays to put some time into creating content that other businesses will want to mention to their audiences. You can also write guest posts on quality sites and encourage local social media influencers to link to your website.
Local SEO is becoming more and more important, as Google starts to focus on local businesses, aiming to give customers what they want. Although it can be time consuming, it isn’t difficult, and it’s definitely worth optimising your website for the local market, because this will help to increase traffic, leads, conversions and ultimately, your revenue.
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