Local SEO

10 Tips to make your Local SEO robust

The total number of internet users has gradually increased in the last five years. This evolution has transformed the marketing strategy to the next level. Starting from local shops to big companies, all invest their money on SEO to rank the product and boost their sales. In such a condition, affording a perfect SEO service can be an unsympathetic decision for small business owners. But, this post will look in detail for the solutions to all those problems. It can even help small marketers to grab some space on the web and drive new customers to their shops.

What does Local SEO mean, and why is it necessary?
To understand the true meaning of local SEO, it is necessary to check out the below example of local searches by google:

The above google search indicates that someone interested in making a tattoo is searching for some nearby shops. A tattoo artist charges $30 to $4000 for making different styles of tattoos. The above local search suggestions make it easy for the customer to decide which shop is best based on the reviews. Users can also get the same recommendations while searching for any other product. It helps to bring new customers to the shop and increase the earning of the local shop owners.

Tips to make your Local SEO robust:
The above example is only a single strategy for Local business owners to boost their services. Many other excellent online ideas are also there to improve the business in a much better way. Some of the tips that can be helpful for local marketers can the following:

List your business to Google:

The above example of a tattoo shop is possible by listing the shop name to google. The surprising fact is that Google doesn’t charge any money to drop any local shop name on the first page. In this way, Google can grab more data from the local headers and increase search results on google maps.

Full steps to register your business to Google:

It is possible with the help of both android phones and websites. Download the google business app or visit business.google.com and complete the signup process to register your business.
Users have to sign in with the Gmail account and register the business on Google by selecting a business category, location, phone number, website details, etc.
Google will verify the details of posted business by sending a postcard to the mentioned address within 14 days based on the location.
This postcard will contain a PIN that the user has to enter on the google business website to verify it.

Use local business listing websites:

Instead of googling, Other websites are also there to help small business people ranking in search engines. This website charges a significantly lower price in comparison to other paid advertisement platforms. Local business persons can choose it as an alternative to directing their business on search engines at the time of festivals or seasons as per the type of product.
Some of the most popular local business listing websites are the following:

Bing places: It works in the same strategy as Google’s business. Customers using platforms like bing as search engines can also drive down to the local business website.
Yellow pages: It is the most popular website to list local deals. Yellowpages can be an option for small-businesses people for ranking the services on google. The user doesn’t need to take tension for SEO as the website automatically ranks businesses based on their keywords and margin of investment.
Other websites: Some other websites that provide the same type of facility are chamber, Yelp.com, Citysearch, etc. The same kind of business listings is available to rank the business on google.

Update full business details:

Most of the local business persons don’t upload complete data regarding their services. People mostly don’t have social pages links to upload. But, a regional listing of businesses can give benefits only if it is complete with all details. Companies having thorough information get ranked first in comparison to the unfilled local listing. It is because google robots have data about the customer engagement related to time spent on the page. Therefore, web pages getting more impressions easily get ranked. Don’t leave the boxes blank while filling google business data. It will create the right image among customers for services.
Essential things to fill on the google my business website:

Complete details of working hours to make the customer know about opening and closing times.
Multiple phone numbers for receiving calls at work. A single missed call is like leaving an opportunity for profit-making.
Update professional email if you have a website or update regular Gmail id, whichever is available.
Upload the best photographs of quality products to drive attention from the customers.

Collect customer review:

Google ranks the local business based on engagements. It is, therefore, necessary to collect most reviews from time to time. In the beginning, customers don’t get good traffic from Google search. Consequently, they should ask for reviews from the old customers to get good consumer attention. Many local business people also invest in buying reviews from different Review selling websites to rank their store higher. Collection of reviews from nearby places can help a lot in organizing the listing.

Steps to collect reviews from customers:

Copy the business page link from the listed website.
Share it on WhatsApp groups to get fake reviews from the known ones.
New customers search for the comment below the business website before visiting the shop. So, it’s better to start it with nearby people to get some engagement.

Add Brand to the social listing:

Social pages are the best way to take the business online. Local business people can make a Facebook page to gather all their customers in one place. Facebook pages with high engagement and followers also get ranked on search engines and come as suggestions on the top. It is the best way to make the customer aware of the latest offers and discounts related to products on festive occasions. It also builds trust between the customers related to product and service feedback.

Tips to connect social page to the business listing:

Copy the link to the Facebook page.
Open the google business app and paste the link to the social account section to connect it to the Google local business listing.
Businesses having more social links on the local listing can rank much better in Google.

It also gives clear-cut information related to the business page of Facebook. Users can drive down to Facebook or Instagram page and view all the details about the service to develop their interest.

Create a professional website:

People having a website can get good impressions from the customer. Nowadays, top-level domains are coming at low prices. In fact, No SEO knowledge is required for listing local stores on google business. Google business listing has an option of submitting website details. The website gets displayed on the about section of the banner, including google maps. The new audience can come and drive to local sellers’ websites to know about their portfolio. Businesspersons must upload photographs of their recent and past work using a proper template to attract customers.
Local vendors who are thinking to start a website for free without the knowledge of coding can go through the below websites:

Wix.com: It is the most popular website-making tool that doesn’t need knowledge of coding. The user only has to drag and drop designs for making a website.
Google sites: Google sites also allow the creation of websites. Users need to choose any template and make arrangements manually to ready a website in 5 minutes. After making it ready, users can link the google site URL with a custom domain to give it a professional look.
WordPress: The free platform of WordPress allows users to create websites with a subdomain.

Submit website URL to Google Analytics:

Google Analytics is a tool for monitoring the details of traffic in any URL. It can help to understand better if the local listing is performing well on the web or not. Local vendors have to create an account on analytics.google.com and verify the website data using HTML code to confirm the identity. It helps the local businessperson to track daily records of visitors coming on their website. Looking into these reports, the vendors should keep customizing the local listing to increase the traffic.

Full steps to link google business with Google Analytics:

Create an account on analytics.google.com
Login to the account and create a campaign for Google business listing.
Now copy the full URL of the website and paste it on the URL box.
Google will ask for verifying the ownership using HTML code or TXT domain record.
Paste the HTML code after the body HTML tag of the website to verify the ownership.
Users can also do the same by changing DNS records on the domain provider and adding TXT records.

Create videos related to your business:

SEO doesn’t only mean to rank a business on a local listing. YouTube is also a good platform where billions of users come daily to watch videos. It can be the best place for marketing and getting a targeted audience. Local vendors must upload the video related to their business on YouTube channels. They must use the appropriate keywords on title and description to rank the videos on YouTube. It will help the business owners in gaining customers on a broad platform based on the product. Local vendors can self introduce the location and services offered at their shop to bring more new customers. They should also not forget to give links to the website, Facebook page, and google maps for the explicit invitation to interested customers.

Focus to create backlinks:

Backlinks are the crucial factor that helps to increase the domain authority of a website. High-page authority blogs don’t take much time to rank on the search engine. Local vendors should start building the links on open platforms like Quora and medium-like websites to benefit SEO link juices for ranking. This stuff can be quickly done using online tools like Moz and Href. Don’t go for any temporary website to create backlinks as it may increase spam score. Always move for creating high domain authority do-follow backlinks to get rank faster on google.
A local business person usually doesn’t have a significant investment for affording SEO. So, they can use the following free tools to extract some SEO data:

Uber suggests: to get data of keyword difficulty, keyword volume, and website data.
WMS Everywhere: It is a chrome extension that can give more accurate keyword volume and CPC results.
MOZ bar: It can check the domain and page authority and bring up the competition between websites.

Ace in Voice searches

Google voice search might seem comparatively new to the system. With the advent of smartphones and extensive usage by local people in their native languages, Google has come a long way in improving voice recognition in different languages.
It is important to give proper attention to voice searches which are up to 20% according to Google. Another added benefit is that it will optimize the traditional search as well.
As of now, there are no tools to properly find voice keywords. Giving attention to how the general public around you uses this facility is a good start. Check out the tips below to voice optimize your website listing.

- Aim for a long string of keywords of local importance. For example, if your business is French cuisine in [your locality]. This will enable your brand to appear organically in both voice and regular search results.

Your Brand First: Utilize the power of Position Zero (P0). Voice search only provides the most relevant result of any query. Your brand should strive to appear in the featured snippets or as the result on the zero-position of the result page itself. High-quality keyword and search engine optimization only can attain this.

Create capsule-size information. Keep your content precise and concise so that the reader, as well as the search engine, can comprehend it easily, in the case the latter gets you to Position Zero. The easy to read, right to the point information is encouraged by Google by bringing it to the top.

Create Quality Content:

Content is regarded as the king of SEO. Writing high-quality articles loaded with all the information related to work can surely rank the website on google. Keywords like best tattoo shops in local areas don’t have much high competition. So, select the keyword difficulty using the free or paid keyword research tool to get an idea about the competition among websites. Now, write a lengthy article and describe each term in-depth using the proper placement of keywords, images, and make it plagiarism free to rank the website. This method might be more time taking than all others. But, once it gets indexed, then it becomes challenging for another website to beat the competition. So, believe in describing services in words to bring new customers to your business.
Below are the things you should consider while creating content.

Different Service Locations, Different SEO Content: It is not new information that the content should be cent per cent unique for every page you have. It means if you have branches in different locations keep the contents of each page different.

It won’t be common knowledge that if you strictly keep the duplicate content at bay you can create landing pages that will help you stay popular on local SEO where you may not be physically established yet.
From the information, you understood from this article you already know this trick won’t work in Map Pack as Google My Business profile is mandatory for that.
Yet, you can rank great in the good old local organic results with numerous different keywords. You can gain enormous traffic if you do serve locals in that area.

Rich snippets are the new Face value Facts: When you search for a product or a place the result that shows up with a link would have a general description of the services provided. Rich snippets will have additional information which can increase the traffic. This can be accomplished by proper utilization of schema markup. It is a combined effort from popular search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

It might seem odd that competitors united to help each other, yet schema.org is precisely that. The valuable information schema can include in the SERPs are, location, services provided, charges, reviews, etc. Schema markups are nicknamed ‘Virtual Business Cards’ by some. Another important quality is that it is completely organic.
The process is quite easy to implement and doesn’t require any coding skills, yet careful and correct execution is mandatory.

Keep the title suspenseful skillfully utilizing Google tag limit: The tip here is to start the title with a catchy and intriguing statement. Make it go past the current Google title tag limit (50 characters) which will create a cutoff making the person eager to click on the link. This increases traffic by a significant amount judging by the success rate.

Get involved in Local Community

Your interactions with the Local community is directly proportional to the Digital public networking benefits you would receive. Among many innovative ways to take part in social interactions, organizing campaigns with NGOs’, sponsoring online as well as offline seminars, events or even programs in local media. These are all proven ways that can give the brand a stronghold among the competitors.
Final Words:
Every business has to go through the rivalry of making profits. The local business person also has to face the same type of difficulty to grow their business. All the above strategies for optimizing local SEO is beneficial if taken seriously. Nowadays, maximum users search Google to find discounts and quality before visiting any shop. So, the small business person must be ready with the correct SEO tricks to boost sales for their business.