6 Most Effective Local SEO Traits

1
May 2014

Posted by: Category:Search Engine Optimization

 

When you are targeting the global market, you have tons of competition & so many hard milestones to reach. As we all know, to be in top results for global queries, you have to be a renowned brand with too many back-links and high reputation.

However, for local businesses, the scenario is quite different. When you have a limited particular area to target with your business, you can reach to top of search engine results comparatively easily. Search engine optimization for targeting particular regions is called local SEO.

With local SEO, you get more chances to win online market for particular region. As mobile devices and search engine capabilities are now fairly improved, targeted search results have became functionally more accurate & useful. On the other side, wise execution of local SEO strategy can put your business to top of search engine results and give you constant targeted traffic. At Smartinfosys.net, we have done local SEO for more than 50 different companies & fetched their search results in Google top 5s.

As an extracted juice of that hard-earned sweat, here are few brilliant points that you should consider to rank your business highest with local SEO:

 

1- Do Smarter Keyword Research:
Keyword research establishes the base for your local SEO campaign & smart keyword research can help you slash your local SEO efforts roughly up to 20%. That is because keywords define how strong the on-page optimization & content on your site will be.

Lets take an example,
Suppose you are a grocery store in New Jersey targeting only people of New Jersey locally. In this case, however the search term “Grocery store” is quite more searched than “Grocery store in New Jersey”, the later term will be more suitable to bring you more business simply because people around New Jersey will be more likely to click on your results & visit your website. And people searching for “grocery store” might visit your website but would bounce off very soon on finding that you are specific to New Jersey.

 

2- Register Your Business At Google+ Local
Now-a-days with improved importance of Google+, it has became almost necessary to have a dedicated Google+ business page for your business to get found over the Internet with better local SEO. Also Yahoo & Bing local places are quite important for better online visibility. To register with these services, you will only need to enter your business details & then verify your identity by phone or by PIN that you will receive at your doorstep.

However there are thousands of registered business, only few of them with optimized business profile can get found on top in SERPs so make sure you have your business page over Google, Bing & Yahoo well optimized.

 

3-Leave Your NAP Traces Everywhere
After getting most optimal keywords and business listings, third most important thing you should consider is the trait of leaving your traces everywhere you go. At every business directory you register, at every single citation you create, make sure you have put your business name, address & phone number & also make sure that all of them are all same. When search engines find these three things together at multiple sites, they will be able to co-relate these details for listing it in search engine results.

 

4-Get Reviewed As Much As Possible
Local reviews matters the most to your customers. Even if you are found on first page of search engines, you might get ignored due to your reviews. However, it doesn’t mean that you should be creating fake business reviews as Google is smart enough to identify the manual patterns of reviewing. Better you try to get naturally good reviews with quality service.

Google & other search engines treat review sites like Angie’s list, Yelp, Foursquare etc special way. So make sure you have listed your business over all them and encourage your customers to leave your review on them. Also make sure you have links to those sites on your business website so the customers those have visited your site & used your service/product can leave their reviews easily from your site.

 

5-Get Classified
Ad posting, however is a bit underrated SEO technique, we have learnt from our years of experience that classified ads get more preference for local searches and businesses. By posting as many classifieds as possible over different websites, you can ensure maximum chances of passive web visibility.

Classifieds can not drive your website total direct traffic but by placing your links in descriptions and URL fields, you can create valuable back-links and drive partial traffic to your website. Apart from traffic, it will also generate direct business queries for your business.

We have been able to get few of our clients on first page of Google with help of targeted classifieds. However it is out of your control which classified site will be featured on first page, you can obviously avail more possibility of traffic by posting more ads on different sites.

 

6- Build Better Back-links & Better Social Reputation
Search engines, especially Google, now treats social signals more seriously so you should consider building better social reputation more seriously, especially in case of online businesses. However, it is bit harder to increase your social reputation, we have few key ideas for that also which you can implement for better social reputation.

Building your own on-site blog is great way to increase audience engagement. On your on-site blog, you have to regularly update useful content & provide easy sharing options so that your audience can get easily involved with your business & share it with other fellows like them. Blogging will also increase your back-links if your blog offers really valuable information to your audience.

In implementing other link building techniques for your business website, you should take care that the anchor text & descriptions are also containing your location keywords. For example, to build a link from reputed web directory a link title “Laundry suppliers in New Jersey” would be more preferable than “Best Laundry supplies”. Thus you have to do everything almost the same as that in global SEO but keep it more specific & localized to get more easily found for local search queries.

All in all, local SEO is more easy & effective than global SEO but it takes patience as Search engines will need to relate effectively with your business & its influence over local people in your area.

You have to have patience to consistently build better reputation & credible back-links & once it’s done, you will surely be able to get rank on top of search engines & keep your business there for longer time too. If you are sick of doing this all & it looks too much painstaking to you, we have large staff of experienced SEO executives who can do all this on behalf of you. In that case, please contact us. We will love to work with you.

20 thoughts on “6 Most Effective Local SEO Traits

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