How to Improve Local SEO Results: 14 Tips That Will Get Your Business Seen

Marketing to target customers in your specific area can be challenging, especially if you are a small business. You may not have the resources to get in touch with them or the budget to run ads in the local newspaper.

If you are facing the exact same situation, fret not! You can take a few actionable steps to boost your search engine rankings in the local search results.

Here's why we say this:

If you look at the current statistics, 97% of people have conducted a search online for a local business. 28% of local searches result in a purchase.

This means, all you need to do is get your local SEO in order.

In this post, we'll discuss some useful tips to achieve the same.

Implementing these tips will help prospective customers see that you are located near them and they might end up purchasing from you.

Let's begin with these tips.

What Is Meant by Local SEO?

Before we get to the main subject, let's define local SEO first.

Local SEO is an SEO strategy that helps boost the visibility of businesses in local search results on Google.

It can benefit any kind of business serving a geographical area or having a physical location.

Tip: If you carry out a search on Google for any major keywords associated with your business and a map pack (a map with three listings) shows up underneath it, then you can very well increase business growth with the help of local SEO.

14 Tips to Improve Your Local SEO Results

If you want to boost local SEO, it might seem an uphill task at first, but improving it is actually not that difficult.

Take a look at these tips and you will know what we are talking about:

1. Claim Your Google Business Profile

One of the essentials of making your local SEO successful is claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile (previously called Google My Business).

If the latest statistics are to be believed, 46% of the total searches on Google are for a local service or local business. Google Business Profile helps create an online presence for your business. It will display your profile on Google when people search for your business name.

Google Business Profile views can result in a phone call, website visit, or a direction request.

Tip: Learn and implement Google My Business optimization tips to improve your chances of ranking higher in local search.

2. Carry Out Internal Linking

Setting up internal linking holds immense value in giving your local SEO a boost.

This is because when you do internal linking across your pages, Google gets more context about your site. As a result, the less frequently visited sections get a boost in the search engine results.

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3. Start a Blog

The benefit of starting a blog cannot be emphasized enough.

Insightful, informative, and well-thought-out articles keep individuals on your site for longer and help you rank for more keywords.

Even if you look at the latest statistics, companies with blogs generate 67% more leads every month than those without them.

4. Keep a Check on Your Meta Titles and Descriptions

Meta titles and descriptions are also two of the things you need to keep in check in order to stay on top of local SEO.

A meta title is the text shown on the browser tab and search engine results page to indicate a webpage's topic.

Meta descriptions, on the other hand, usually inform users with a brief summary of what a page is about.

These two, when optimized promptly, hold power to convince your potential customers to visit your site. Think of these two as your shop's window on Google. The window has to be enticing enough to persuade people to enter your shop.

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Make sure you have unique titles and descriptions for each page. Incorporate your SEO keywords as well as the location. See if you can add a compelling CTA as well.

5. Ensure Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly

If you look at the current statistics, 76% of people end up visiting a nearby business within 24 hours of searching for it on a smartphone.

This means your website needs to be mobile-friendly.

If you don't have a mobile-friendly site, then your potential customers will easily get annoyed when they view your website on their smartphones. They will quickly leave the site, and it will negatively affect your rankings.

Take a look at some of the steps you can take to optimize your site for mobile:

• Use bigger fonts for easy readability.
• Ensure intuitive UI.
• Use copy and images sparingly. They should be used just to convey the required information.
• Ensure your site loads quickly.

All in all, if you are looking for ways on how to improve local SEO, making your website mobile-friendly should take high priority.

6. Turn Your Attention to Local Keywords

To move ahead in your journey of becoming a player in local SEO, another step you need to take is to focus on local keywords.

Let's take an example to understand why we say this:

A business delivering packages from one place to another will struggle if it tries to rank for the keyword courier delivery service. Instead, it should focus on local keywords such as courier delivery service in X.

When you focus on local keywords, it becomes easier for you to rank on the first page of search engine results.

7. Assess Your Website's Speed

To boost local SEO, you need to review your site speed and improve it if necessary.

This is because a slow-loading site can drastically reduce the time for which people stay on your website. As a result of this, your site's search engine rankings can decrease.

If you see that you need to improve your site speed, you can always hire a web developer. Or, if you don’t want to take this route, you can do certain tweaks yourself, such as:

• Optimize the size of your images. Decrease image size while maintaining their quality with the help of tools such as JPEGmini or Kraken.
• Decrease the use of web fonts.
• Detect 404 errors, which means “page not found.”
• Decrease redirects.

8. Always Keep an Eye on Stats

Today, we all know about the ever-changing nature of the Google Algorithm. We are also aware of the fact that backlinks can vanish, or our competitors can do a finer job at boosting their local SEO.

All of this points to one major conclusion SEO isn't something that you just do once and forget about it.

In order to stay on top of SEO, you need to keep checking your stats.

For this, use tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Bing Webmaster Tools. These will help you check how many people visit your site and help track your rank in the search engines as well.

9. Use Location Pages

Another tip you need to implement to boost local SEO is setting up location pages.

Location pages are a prerequisite if your business has multiple locations in a certain area. Ensure these pages include the following (at least):

• Name, contact details, address
• Store hours
• Testimonials
• Individualized descriptions
• Parking availability
• Promotions
• Google Maps attached to the page

Note: When you have multiple locations, you should create unique content for each one of the pages.

Tip: In case you have a single location, you must create an About Us page possessing local, relevant information.

10. Use Local Business Directories to Your Advantage

Another important tip that falls in our list of how to improve local SEO is:

Get your name, phone number, and address into local business directories such as MapQuest, Yelp, and Foursquare.

Here’s a complete list of things you should include in your company listings:

• Phone number and address
• Business name
• A comprehensive description of your business
• A backlink to your site

This information should be consistent across all directories.

11. Ask for Reviews

Search engines such as Google value feedback from customers. Getting five-star reviews is significant for increasing your presence when it comes to local SEO.

Ensure you ask satisfied customers to leave their feedback on your Google Business Profile.

Tip: Reply to both positive and negative reviews.

12. Keep Tabs on Your Competition

Another step that you must take to boost local SEO is to check what your competitors are doing in search engines.

When you check where your rivals are ranking for different keywords, you can determine if it's going to be difficult or easy to win the search engine ranking race.

Here's what you precisely need to do:

Check the keywords they are using, go through their website, check who is linking to them, and so on.

13. Optimize for Voice Search

We all have seen a rapid increase in the usage of voice search over the years.

Keeping this in mind, ensure you optimize for voice search. In other words, you need to optimize for how individuals ask questions when they speak into their devices.

Here's what we recommend you should do:

Make adjustments to the SEO of your content in a way that it fits a more conversational tone of an individual speaking. This is because your prospective customers will use more long-tail keywords while carrying out voice searches.

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For starters, this is what you can do:

• Use the traditional question starters (when, who, why, how, and what)
• Voice searches are often performed when a user quickly needs a particular piece of information. For instance, your target customer can use voice search to know your hours of operation. So, make sure this information is readily available.

14. Earn High-Quality Backlinks

Link signals are important factors for localized results and local pack results.

But you may wonder, what are link signals?

The backlinks pointing to your website are link signals. It’s critical to get high-quality backlinks to improve your local SEO.

Here’s what you can do to get high-quality backlinks:

• Guest blog on reputed websites that have high domain authority.
• Create content on your site that others would want to link to.
• Email or use social media to engage with local influencers and get them to link back to you.

Wrapping It Up

A local SEO strategy helps you bring in leads, sales, and revenue. From claiming your Google Business Profile to optimizing for voice search, implementing these tips can make your local SEO successful.

In the end, we want you to always remember:

The SEO approach for small businesses that concentrate on a specific city or town needs to be considerably different from that of businesses with a nationwide presence.

So plan and act accordingly. Good luck!