SEO is used to get a website to appear at the top of a search engine, so local SEO is the same thing, only for small businesses. It is essential to succeed as a business, and with local SEO you provide information, whether in the form of content, customer reviews or accurate location, which gives value to your website in local searches. Now we tell you more.
what elements are necessary to achieve good local SEO?
- NAP (Name, address and phone): Name, address and phone, that is, the key information about your business that must be constant. In every place on the web where your business appears, these data must always be the same, because they will help you to position yourself and will give confidence to all users.
- Google My Business: This Google tool aims to group local businesses and connect them with their customers. When your business has a Google My Business profile, it automatically connects to Maps and Google +. Remember that by using Google + frequently you will rank better in the search engine.
- When you get good reviewsfrom your customers , not only do you build trust, but you also give yourself a better ranking. Also, getting reviews makes the algorithm improve your ranking.
- Registerin directories. This makes you known in your geographic area. Google and Bing algorithms take directory listings into account and rank you higher. On the other hand, it is also important to be careful with untrustworthy sites because they could damage your SEO. Likewise, registering in a directory confirms that your business is part of a community and proves that you are a real business.
- Local SEO makes your small business profitable. Implementing a good local SEO strategy will make your business profitable in the short term and give it greater visibility at a regional level. Don't forget to monitor and measure results to check the benefits of your strategy.
- Promote yourself on social networkssuch as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. Use them in connection with each other to offer a coherent image of your eCommerce and promote the general and local SEO of your business.
- Local schema markup: Include structured data or schema markup on your website to provide Google with more information related to your local business. You can visit the Search Console help centre to check the data markup for local businesses that you need to fill in. You can also use Google's data markup wizard or use a plugin to help you implement it. There are plenty of them for the different CMSs on the market, but most of them do not include local data markup in their free version.
- Search for keywords and competitors. You should perform a keyword or keyword research to determine which keywords or search terms your customers normally use to search for your products or services.
- Work on local linkbuilding. Linkbuilding or link building technique is fundamental in web positioning, as through links you will increase the authority of your domain and indicate to Google where to place your website, which together with the relevance of your content and technical SEO aspects is what will determine whether you manage to reach the top positions in the SERPs.
- Position your photos and videos. Don't forget that all the content you create can become your ally for your local positioning. In the same way, remember that YouTube is one of the most used search engines in the world, and belongs to Google. Introduce whenever possible in your videos your keywords to improve local positioning, that is, the name of the town, the type of business or the location of your neighbourhood.
- Keep everything updated. If Google has made it clear that stagnant pages, with poor and immobile content are not to their liking and they will position them below other websites that do meet their requirements. Take time to adjust and add good content to your website and your Google MyBusiness profile. It is important that Google detects this activity, and also that we can adapt this content to new SEO trends, new interesting keywords or that we can apply all the knowledge we have learned about SEO.
- Add your embedded Google map, i.e. include the Google map on your website, with the location of your business marked with a pin.
Finally, remember that local SEO makes your small business profitable, so implementing a good local SEO strategy is necessary to give greater visibility at a regional level as well.
