Posted May 29, 2018 | by Afjal Ahmed | in Content SEO

Your definitive guide to local SEO

Thanks to the growing use of mobile over the past couple of years, more and more searches require results in the area local to where the searcher is. This encompasses anything from ‘restaurants near me’ to ‘loft conversion services in Hampstead’ and so forth. As such, local SEO is an integral part of your business’ overall SEO strategy. Here’s a guide to the essentials.

Google My Business

A Google My Business listing is the first thing you should ask your SEO exec or digital marketing company to set up for you. This increases your chances of showing up in features such as Google Maps and Local Finder, as well as organic search results in general. The first step is to claim and verify your business listing, then ensure imagery, opening hours and contact details are added.

This listing also enables people who have visited your establishment the chance to review it for other Google users’ benefit. It goes without saying that the more positive reviews you receive, the more likely you are to get business.

Location terms

It’s also worth asking the provider of your SEO services to ensure your location pages are optimised with the relevant terms. Increasing the copy on your ‘contact us’ page is one way to do this: directions from the nearest town or motorway can be added, as well as local public transport links, and you can mention the surrounding areas that you serve. If you have more than one physical location, you may want to optimise separate pages for each location.

Schema markup

Your digital marketing company will also be able to help with adding schema mark-up to your web pages to ensure they are properly optimised for local SEO. Schema is essentially an addition to the code that tells the search engines where your company is based and what it does. You can add all sorts of information from your address and phone number to your GPS co-ordinates so that your business appears where it should on map tools.

Encourage reviews

We’ve mentioned this above, but as part of your endeavours, getting reviews on your Google My Business listing is an important part of your local SEO strategy. You can encourage reviews in a number of ways: by emailing customers after they have used your service and asking them to leave feedback; by creating a page on your site that instructs them on how they can review your business; or by incentivising feedback with a discount or prize draw.

Outreach

Finally, outreach is a good way to improve your local SEO performance. Your SEO services provider can help with this, identifying other companies in your area that are talking about similar things and offering to exchange blog posts or provide some relevant content which they can link back to your website.

There are several tools and services out there that can help with this process – the key is to build a relationship with other businesses and offer them something of value rather than plunging in requesting a link.