Also, the ways in which Google and other search engines provide results to users continues to change. This makes it harder for local businesses to maintain their rankings for maximum results.
The following will help you lay the foundation for a local SEO campaign that works for your business.
Getting Started With Local SEO
The most important step in local SEO is to make sure you’ve got the basics in place. Most people overlook the most fundamental components in their SEO strategy and lose valuable rankings as a result.
You want to begin to broaden your perspective when it comes to SEO. Establishing the basics is only the beginning.
You must consider other factors such as social media, engagement with your audience, and content creation that is specific to your location.
Audit and Tailor to Your Needs
The auditing process will allow you to see where you should concentrate your efforts. If you aren’t tracking important metrics for your business, then it will be difficult to determine how effective your strategy is.
You’ll need to track your users, where they come from, and at what points along your sales funnel they convert to paying customers. More importantly, you need to define that sales funnel.
The information related to conversion of prospects to customers should be paired alongside with the goals of your business. This helps you create a local SEO plan that is tailored to your unique needs.
Establish the Basics
The audit should start with SEO fundamentals. This includes optimized title tags, meta descriptions, and your link profile.
Your title tags should be optimized for search engines and the users who are looking for your product or service. This will increase the number of people that click through to your site. Review all of your site’s pages and optimize the title tags for each.
Your meta description will also help users in their search queries. This is a big opportunity that many businesses overlook. Give users the information they need so that they know that you can solve their problem.
Link Profile and Citations
The days of acquiring any link to strengthen your profile are gone. Your focus needs to be on acquiring high-quality links.
Consider aligning yourself with well-known and respected sites. This includes Yelp, Wikipedia, or major thought leaders in your industry. You can benefit from their visibility and authority to improve your own.
Your citations should also be consistent throughout all online directories. Find and correct any citations that have not been updated. There are many tools available to make this process easier depending on how many citations you have.
Update any old addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information to ensure accuracy and consistency.
These steps will help you build a strong local SEO campaign that helps local customers find you. Completing an audit guides your efforts to ensure that you have the fundamentals in place for long-term local SEO success.
