5 Top Tips for Local SEO

The importance and power of local search is growing all of the time.  This is true for businesses of all sizes, both small and large. However, the biggest impact of utilizing local search strategies is likely to be on those businesses that are truly local, aiming to satisfy customers in their community and build their client base in this area.

At the same time, smaller and local businesses are often the ones that know less about search. This can be especially true for those companies that have traditionally earned business through leafleting or a listing in a paper business directory. Local search can be hugely beneficial for such businesses if they have suddenly started to see a drop in enquiries; this is probably the reason why. That said, everyone could benefit from investing some time into ensuring they are optimized for local search. We explored five top tips of local SEO for ensuring you get the results you need.

All of the major search engine providers have a business listing and directory of some description. Google Places is the most powerful, but you need to remember that there are other search engines out there. After all, what control do you have over which search engines your potential customers use?

Ensuring that you have verified yourself with these search engines will ensure they are happy to provide you with a genuine listing.

One of the biggest factors in link building is the relevance of the link. Therefore, it is crucial that you look to build links on local websites, whether that is the town business directory, the regional newspaper’s website, or just a community forum specific to your area.

Taking this course of action helps to persuade the search engines that you are important and highly valued in your area. They will feel the same and rank you higher accordingly.

Whether you select a specific landing page to optimize and focus on, or go all out across the whole site with your contact details, you need to ensure you have as much information on there as possible.

We’d recommend the last option; as if your contact details are on every page it is clear to the search spiders that they are important to you. In addition, try something like schema to direct the spiders to the most important information on your page.

The trick to success with local search is getting the focus area as small as possible.

Say you are in New York City. Going for Manhattan, for example, or even Lower Manhattan, is probably too wide an area. Tribeca, SoHo, or Hudson Square is an idea of how specific you need to be.

Ensure this is included in your content, page descriptions, tags, titles, and anything else.

For the best success, ensure that you’re submitting the same information to every directory, and what you do matches your website. For example, targeting Tribeca on some, Lower Manhattan on some, and Manhattan on others doesn’t strengthen your position, it just dilutes your impact.

Make a splash with local search and you give yourself a great opportunity to succeed. Don’t waste the chance to do so!

This post was written by the team at Bright Local who offer some of the best local SEO tools in the industry.