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Improving your Local SEO in 5 Steps

Improving your Local SEO in 5 Steps

Local SEO is becoming more and more essential for businesses that want to rank highly in search results. Google has recently begun putting more of an emphasis on these types of searches, and many businesses have found themselves unprepared to meet this new ranking requirement. If you find that your local SEO is lacking, here are a few things you can do to improve it.

Step 1
Make use of the Google My Business Page. If you haven’t claimed this page already, you need to make that a priority. Google My Business is a tool created by Google that lets you share your business address, description, links to your social media, store days/hours, phone number, and more. If someone searches for your business, all of this information will come up on the side of the search results, making it very easy for customers to find you. Just be sure you completely fill in all of the information, including adding photos.

Step 2
Optimize your landing page for local searches. This is especially vital for small businesses. Your on-page optimization for your landing page should include a title tag that includes your main keyword, city, and state, plus locations and service in your image alt tags, your content, and anything else. Remember not to do any keyword stuffing, though—your content should primarily be written for humans, not search engines.

Step 3
Geo-tag your photos. Geo-tagging includes all of the metadata included with your photos. This metadata tells search engines that a photo should be associated with a certain location. In order to do this, you will need a tool that lets you view and edit your photo’s EXIF data. There are a number of different tools online that let you do this.

Step 4
Gather positive reviews. Great reviews from local customers can do wonders for your local search results. They not only add another piece of data to your Google My Business profile, but they also let potential customers know that your products/services are high quality.

Step 5
Build strong citations through other websites. By claiming your business listing on sites like Yelp or by submitting press releases to local news sites, you’re telling search engines that your business is real and that it exists at the address you’re provided. Just make certain that all of these citations you personally build have a uniform look to them—your name, address, and other information need to be the same.

These are just 5 different methods you can use to improve your local SEO. Like standard SEO, perfecting your local SEO may take a few months of trial and error.

If you’d like to discuss how we can improve your Google local search results, please contact-us today for a free internet marketing quote.