Local Reputation: How to rank your website in local search
If your business is a local one, you’ll want to dominate local search results for your brand. The number one way you can do that is to make sure your main website ranks number one in your geographic area.
Local SEO entails optimizing your website to appear within the search results of your location. A location can be a city, county, postal code, or even a state. Ranking for local SEO attracts more customers who are geographically close to your business. Local SEO tends to be easier than national or global SEO because resources can be focused on a smaller area.
Here are our top 8 local SEO tips to help your business rank in search engines.
- Ensure your business name, address, and phone number is online
- Use internal link structures
- Boost local content creation
- Optimize the URL, title tags, headers, and meta descriptions
- Make your website mobile-friendly
- Add location pages to your web pages
- Use Google My Business captions
- Invest in review management
Ensure your business name, address, and phone number is online – and correct
Name, address, and phone numbers are the keys to local SEO ranking. They need to be correct and consistent in order to optimize your business website for local search.
When a question is asked, Google posts the relevant answer from the data stored – so that data must be correct. You should always ensure details about your business are accurate on not only your website, but Google Maps, Google My Business, and myriad online directories. This can help improve SEO for small businesses and large corporations alike.
Use internal link structures
Well-structured business sites have a higher probability of ranking high in search engines because search engines understand them better. With internal links, you can connect to other web pages on your own site with high-ranking content.
Boost local content creation
Your website will only ever be as good as the content you publish on it. Creating quality content serves many purposes, like answering questions, promoting your products, establishing your business as a thought leader, and staying top of mind as industry trends shift.
Your content should:
- Be easy to read
- Answer all the customer’s questions
- Use the right keywords
- Appeal to your target demographic, especially for the geographical area
Optimize the URL, title tags, headers, and meta descriptions
The meta descriptions and titles give the best description of what each page is all about. Any potential visitors on your web page should have an idea of what to expect on your page after reading these. The title pages should include the name of the location on which you want to achieve higher online visibility for. This helps search engines know which markets are most relevant for your local business.
Make your website mobile-friendly
Local businesses are most often searched on mobile devices. So it makes sense to optimize for the mobile experience. Simply put, this means your site needs to be as fast as possible. If it takes more than one second to load a page it might be too long. Use Google Search Console to test whether each page of your local business site is mobile-friendly, if it’s not then redesign your website templates and reduce image sizes immediately.
Add location to your web pages
Including relevant geographical data points is the best way to let search engines and people know about your area of service. If your business serves a specific county, say so. If it serves specific cities, also spell that out. Google will rank your site in those areas more accurately if it knows where your service areas are located.
Use Google My Business captions
In addition to setting your site up correctly, Google My Business is the simplest way to rank for local SEO. To rank high, you need to verify the business with Google, complete your profile set up, and use the correct business name. The products and services provided should be legit. It is the best way to make customers trust your products. This guide will show you how to setup your Google My Business profile the right way the first time.
Invest in review management
Better reviews improve search results. This is because people share and click more on brands with good reviews. Think about it, you do, don’t you? So does everyone else.
Customers on any web page look for website reviews and feedback. These reviews are from customers who’ve used your products or services. It’s good to encourage the customers who interacted with your business to give you feedback right after their experience while they’re still excited about how awesome their interaction with your business was.
High quality and quantity of reviews can help your business rank high locally. The thoughts and feedback of real-life customers are essential in building trust for your products.
Every company with a local target market can rank well in SEO. The local SEO tips discussed in this blog can help your business to rank higher, reach more people, and improve sales.
Tags: Business Reputation Repair, Reputation Management, Reputation Marketing.
