Local SEO is very important to increase your reach among the local audience. According to one study, four out of the five customers use search engines to gather location information. 50% out of them visit the store on the same day of performing the search. It simply means that you are missing many of your potential customers if you haven’t done local SEO efforts for your website. You can spread awareness about your business among the closest residing prospective clients through local SEO. Considering this, we have created this local SEO guide. In it, we are going to tell you about the things which you should keep in mind while doing the local SEO for your business. You can improve your local SEO with the help of these tips. Let’s have a look:

1. Claim the Listings of your Business:

Adding your business into local listings is the first task that you should perform for the local SEO of your business. But, you should also remember to claim all the listings that are created with the name of your business. Sometimes, people also create duplicate listings. So, it’s your responsibility to identify and remove all the duplicate listings that exist with your company name. You should also ensure that the information provided about your business in these lists is accurate and up to date. You can take help of tools like “Moz Local” to locate all the listings of your business. You just have to enter your company name into the search column, and it will present all the listings that are tied to your business.

2. Keep your Google My Business Account Updated:

Companies usually forget about their listings; once after creating it. They never open their Google My Business account to check whether the information is updated or not. You should remember about your Google My Business account as the searchers depend on the information provided on it. Update your contact details, address, business hours as and when required. Add a brief business description, the link of your website and other necessary information like closing days. To make it appealing, you can also add high-quality images of your workspace or office. By doing so, you will be able to provide the best information about your business to the local audience.

3. Add Location Information on your Website:

Your website should contain location information because Google bots crawl through your website to gather the data. You should add the address, contact details and other relevant information on any page of your website. In addition, your content must contain local keywords that would help your articles to appear when people search for those keywords. By doing so, you help search engines to locate your listing and deliver the accurate information to the users about your business. Also, your website links would appear when someone would perform a search to find something in your particular geographical area.

4. Don’t just Add Information, but also Improve NAP Consistency:

Just think about your name for a while. It contains the same spelling and the same way of writing since your childhood. It will remain the same until the end of your life. Now, if you would write your name with different spellings everywhere, people will be surely confused. Same applies to your company. Due to lots of competition, many companies have the same name with minor differences. Now, users become confused when you write your company name or its address differently on each listing or platform. So, you should take care of every little detail while doing so. If your business name contains Co. Inc. or LLC, then it should be included everywhere. You should also pay attention to the street number, a landmark which you add and road name, etc. Your company’s NAP – name, address and phone number should be exactly the same everywhere.

5. Use Local Keywords in Title Tags:

The best way to appear in local search results is to add an adequate number of local keywords into your content. The first thing which readers or search engine crawlers see in your content is your titles. So, adding local keywords in the titles would be very helpful for your local SEO. For example, if you own an Indian restaurant in Chicago, then you can add keywords in your title like “best Indian restaurant in Chicago” to get the location-based results. In this case, people who are searching for Indian food in Chicago can easily locate your website on Google by performing the local search. So, this is a straight way to reach to your target audience.

6. Get Local Coverage:

Your business can get the much-needed limelight by appearing in major local publications because these get high index on Google. You have to gather information about the local publications in your area and target them. You can get in their publications by building a good professional relationship with these publications and their journalists. You can also come into news coverage by doing this. Your local SEO will be improved to a great extent when you will do that.

7. Improve the Internal Linking Structure of your Website:

Your website structure also affects your overall SEO ranking. So, you should improve it. Add internal links of your own pages like blog posts and information pages on your website. Don’t just link all the pages to the homepage, but ensure that every page is interconnected in some way or the other. By doing so, you can improve the user experience as well. Your website navigation would be better with a well-planned internal structure. It will also improve your local SEO ranking. So, all these efforts are highly helpful in increasing your local ranking. You need to work on it as soon as possible because you can’t miss the prospective clients that reside in the same geographical area of your business.