Virtually every transaction begins with a search.
It doesn’t matter if someone wants to order food, buy groceries, buy new clothes, or something else. Most of them start with a digital approach. Of all of these searches, approximately 46 percent are for local businesses.
Now it’s up to you to figure out how to rank those local searches. Investing in local SEO solutions will meet this need.
Optimizing your search efforts for a local audience uses the same strategies as organic search. The difference is that you focus on people close to you – the customers who are most likely to come into your business and make direct physical contact with your company.
When you’re ready to step up your local SEO efforts, try some of the tips listed here.
Perform a local SEO audit
SEO audits can help you see the overall health of your website. It will display any technical issues that affect the ranking and recommended fixes based on the results found.
If you’re working on optimizing your website for local search, a local SEO review might be more effective than a general one. This is because it delves deeper into the elements that affect search results performance at the local level. Some of the pieces of information that a local SEO audit can help with include competitive analysis, on-page SEO performance, backlinks analysis, and social signals.
Choose the right keywords for local search results
An important local SEO tip is to see which keywords your website is currently ranking for. By investing in keyword research, you will find new ways that your website will appear more frequently when someone searches for what you offer.
One of the fastest ways to optimize your website for local SEO is to add a location to your keyword. For example, if you own a hardware store in Atlanta, consider the keywords that your customers are most likely to use. You can also find keyword ideas to see what terms are used in community forums. After all, when people talk about something, there’s a good chance they’re looking for information about it too. These can be your new keywords.
Localize the content of your website
Now that you have chosen the keywords for your local SEO campaign, you need to use them in the content of your website. Ideally, you should create content for each of the geo-targeted keywords you have chosen. The content should support these keywords. Because of this, you need to localize the content you create.
Create a Local SEO Plan for Better Results
If you want the best possible results from your local SEO efforts, use the tips and information listed here. Working with a professional company can also prove beneficial when developing a local SEO campaign.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.