4 step process to easy local SEO

4 step process to easy local SEO

A lot of people ask what exactly is local SEO and how come it is needed so much for a small business to prosper.

Most of you reading this already know a good amount of information about what SEO is and how to do it for rankings. Well, global rankings and local rankings are different monsters that both need a similar attack to defeat, but you need to do them in a different way. Local SEO can bring in a good amount of foot traffic to your business or website to decide if they want to make a purchase.

In short, if you want to be successful with a local business, you need local SEO.

When you're doing local SEO you probably don't know how important it actually is. With so many people now doing searches on their phones, which will give you results based on your location, you need to be optimized so you can get traffic. The internal location of the phone is taken into consideration when Google notices you're doing a search and will give you specific restaurants, shops, events, etc. specifically to what you're searching. You won't usually see some pancake house and Texas showing up when you're in Chicago, unless there's a glitch in the matrix.



The benefits of local SEO are as follows:

• You can compete with the big competitors in your niche.
• Getting your business in front of local clients who are searching for you.
• Capturing a sale (sort of) right when your customer is looking for you.
• It's 100% Free unless you pay a company to do the work for you.

Here are a few steps to help your Local SEO

1. You'll need to claim your business
For starters, go to Google My Business and set everything up so you can show up on Google Maps. This alone will help bring in a lot of local sales if you can get the positive reviews flowing in. You will then have to go to the rest of the big citation websites such as Yelp, CitySearch, YellowPages, SuperPages, MerchantCircle, etc. and set up all your pages to claim your business. Sometimes you will notice that these big websites will have a very basic listing already viewable to the public and you will need to claim it for yourself then edit it. The only good thing about the bare bones page is that you will not have to worry about it being indexed since it most likely has already been done.

These are all free so you don't have to worry about spending any money on it. It will take a good amount of time to do this, but you can pay a few service providers here to do the work for you if you want.


2. Optimize your listings
Obviously you'll have to add the basics like your business name, phone number, address, your hours and most importantly your websites URL. You can always set up multiple listings if you have more than a single location, this is not against the rules and these websites actually like you doing this. This will only help your search engine rankings because you'll have a few links from the same website

Now this is one of the most important things I will cover... You will need to keep your information consistent across every website that you will be claiming your listing on. If your business is located on 123rd Hopscotch Avenue you will want it to be "123rd Hopscotch Avenue" across every directory. You don't want to use "123rd Hopscotch Avenue" on Yelp and then use "123 HopScotch Ave." on YellowPages because it's a different listing and could potentially confuse the search engines. Making it as easy as possible to get the search engines to love you is what we're going for here, so don't do anything to confuse them lol.

After you have all of the above finished, you will need to go through your listings and add images that will show your business in a good light so that people can get a good idea of what you're about before they come to you. You can also add in your menus (if you're a restaurant), promos you have going on and if you have seasonal hours for specific days or times of the year. It would be best to do this as you go so that you don't have to log into every account and set this up, but some people like to do everything in steps.

At the end of the optimization step you'll need to select the closest category for your business. Almost all of the directories will have something like this in order to classify each listing, but some may not so don't worry about it if you can't find it. When you properly categorize your listing you're letting the search engines get a better idea of what you're all about.


3. Optimize your website for the locals who are searching for you.
For the best results you'll need to optimize your own pages for local search results. What you'll want to do first is add your business address in your footer, this will usually spread across all your pages if you do it right. If you don't have a dynamic footer, you'll have to add your business info to every page you can. Your business info should of course have your city, state, address, county (maybe), and phone number. You should also add these to your description and titles if possible, but only if it makes sense. This will give you a big boost in local search results because you're specifically saying "Hey, this is where I'm working!" and Google will take notice lol.


4. Keep your info current.
You should probably go through all of your listings at least once every 3 to 6 months just to be sure everything is current. This doesn't usually take a lot of time unless you've switched your location, phone numbers, hours of operation and pretty much anything that has to deal with your company. You can usually have a service provider here on SEOclerks do this if you want, but you usually don't have to change everything. Keep your top 10 listings bookmarked in a specific folder so you can open them all at the same time. This will streamline the process and you can just close any of the tabs if they don't need to be edited





In Conclusion:
When performing local SEO you will want to do all of the above before you strive out on a major backlinking campaign. If you don't have the foundation buit before you start putting up a house, it will fall in a short amount of time. The same goes with all backlinking and SEO campaigns




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Thanks!

Razzy