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The world is a global village. But the most important customers for your business may still reside in your locality.

Do you optimize your website to attract potential customers who perform local searches around you?

Or you’ve been losing them like unnecessary weight?

Well, they use search engines when they’re about to buy products too.

Improving local SEO could be the game changer in gaining more customers for your business.

There is less competition for important keywords, the advantage of proximity to your customers, and a higher probability they have a prior knowledge of your business.

What even makes local SEO vital for your business is that search engine users perform it so much.

According to research by Google, 4 in 5 consumers conduct local searches on search engines.

You’ll agree with me that it’s bad business if you lose this significant number of potential customers.

If you’re a new website owner, you may still be asking what local SEO is all about.

What is local SEO?

Local SEO include the steps taken on your business website to optimize it for search engine users who are searching for important keywords related to your products from your locality.

How do you optimize your product for prospects and customers close to you? How do you increase search engine traffic to your website?

There are many steps you should take to gain this advantage. I’ll explain 7 of them in this post.

If you implement these tactics, you would have a significant advantage over businesses in your area with no knowledge of local SEO.

Let’s begin.

1. Google My Business Page

This is a page Google has made available for all businesses. And what’s the catch?

It’s free publicity for your business.

For local keywords that involves searches for a nearby product or service, Google provides 3 results at the top of the results page for businesses. In a study, the local carousel result received 32% of the clicks.

These results show businesses in the locality of the searcher where they can meet their needs. For instance, a search like “restaurants near me” will bring up 3 restaurants at the top of the results.

Even a search term like “restaurants” will also give you these results.

Now, what you have to note is that you’re competing with local businesses in your area to show up for these searches.

But what if your business is not registered on Google My Business? You lose all these potential customers.

And if you run a restaurant, you could be wasting a lot of food that would cure people of hunger. Not cool.

These are not ordinary searchers. But usually searchers with the intent you want. Which is to buy your products.

If you’re yet to register your business on Google My Business, you should do it now.

How do you go about it?

To create a Google My Business page, navigate to the website and click on “START NOW.”

For the next pages, you’ll fill in your business name, and then select your country. On this page, you’ll enter your city and address.

You’ll also get to select your service area and your business category.

You’ll fill in the other pages until you get to the last page where you’ll finish and verify your business.

When you click on the “FINISH” button, you’ll be asked to choose a method of verification.

After this, you can see your Google My Business dashboard. There are some parts of your listing you won’t be able to manage until you verify your business.

After registering your business on Google My Business, you don’t just abandon it. There are steps to take to make sure it’s optimized to convert visitors who land on the page.

Some of the activities you should ensure on your page are:

Add Posts

You can add short posts to you business listing page. Even though these posts usually disappear in about seven days, it provides important information about your business to anybody who visits your page.

With posts, you can update people about new developments, promotions, or other things you want to inform them. Google makes it easy as it provides a template for posting these offers.

This is an opportunity to update and refresh your listing regularly.

Add images

A visual representation of your business on your page makes it look real. You should add images regularly to show different views of your business location from time to time.

These are some activities that help you to update your page regularly.

2. Optimize your website for mobile devices

For most businesses today, traffic from smartphones is heavier than other devices.

On Google, where you’ll get majority of your search traffic, more searches are done on mobile devices than desktop.

In fact, that is one of the reasons Google now engages in mobile-first indexing. This means the mobile version of your website will be indexed into the search engine before your desktop version.

One other big reason to make your website mobile-optimized is that most people perform local searches when they’re ready to buy from a local business.

Research shows that 50% of smartphone users visited a store within a day of their local search and 1 in 3 searches on smartphone occur before its users visit a store.

Having a poor website design means you’re already losing potential customers. Your website should be mobile responsive to get the best conversion possible from mobile users.

To test how friendly your website is to mobile users, you can use the Google mobile-friendly test.

If your website is not mobile-friendly, it’ll give you suggestions on steps to take.

3. Have your business on important local listings

One of the ways Google and other search engines determine your website’s authenticity is through your local listings.

When your business appears on many local listings, it looks legit compared to a business that only appears on Google My Business or has no appearance at all.

Apart from Google, there are many local listings like Yelp, Yellow Pages, Yahoo! Local, Angie’s List, and others that are popular.

In fact, here’s a list of 100 local business directories you should add your business to today. 

On some listings, you may find that your business already appears. This could have been done by anybody. All you have to do is claim the listing and add necessary details about your business.

Apart from these, there are listings that are industry related. For instance, if you run a law firm, there are some directories for lawyers and law firms.

Appearing on these directories gives your business credibility as it is a source of endorsement by fellow professionals.

To track your business listings, you can use a tool like Bright Local. This makes it easier to claim your listings. You can also use the tool to track your competitor listings.

Due to the number of listings out there, it may be difficult to appear on every listing. The question is: what are the most important listings your business needs to appear?

It depends. There is no list of directories that every business must use strictly apart from the popular ones as some are only for some locations. However, you can still get a list of the most relevant listings by studying your competitors.

The first step you need to take is to search for a few of your business’ important keywords. Then you identify local businesses that appear in Google top 3 results for listings.

You can write down 2 or 3. The next thing to do is to identify the listings in which they appear.

One way to do this is copy an important detail about the business like their address and search with a quote on Google. This will show you the directories these businesses appear.

These are important directories that your business must also appear to give your website a better chance of appearance.

Note: Important business details like name, address, phone number (NAP), and others must be the same on all listings you appear.

If you have different business information on different listings, it serves as a source of confusion to search engines and your business may start to look like 2 or 3 businesses.

This will see your rank go down. There must be clarity.

By building new local citation, claiming existing ones, and updating information, a dentistry practice was able to get its pages on Google first page for 17 keywords despite having none before the campaign.

4. Encourage customers to leave reviews

How attractive is a product no one has ever used? Not very. Especially if a customer has to spend their hard-earned money on it. A review is a proof that a customer has bought your product or paid for your service.

Potential customers can see their thoughts and make a conclusion on whether to do business with you or not.

It is important that you have as many reviews as possible on your Google My Business listing as it serves as a form of social proof.

According to a local consumer survey by BrightLocal, 76% of consumers always or regularly read reviews when researching local businesses.

One other benefit is that their ratings appear on Google search results page before a visitor clicks through.

However, most customers won’t post a review on your Google My Business listing page. No matter how satisfied they are with your service.

This is because it’s not on their minds. As a business owner, you have to tell your customers to leave a review on your page and they’ll happily oblige.

Apart from Google My Business, there are other local review sites like Yelp where your customers can leave reviews. Encouraging your customers will get you more reviews on these websites.

You don’t need to tell them what to write. And some will leave negative reviews. That’s okay so far they’re few compared to the great reviews. The negative reviews can also help you to see parts of your business you need to improve.

5. Target local keywords

In various locations, you find that they use different vocabularies. For instance, “color” is the right word in America while “colour” is in the U.K.

Apart from that, local keywords could include the location of your business. To get better results, a searcher may include a city name or even name of the street if the city is a large one.

To target local keywords, you’ll have to use the vocabulary you believe searchers are more likely to use in their search coupled with your location. Your location could include both a variation of your city, or region, or even street depending on how many competitors you have.

If there are many businesses offering the same service you’re offering, you could target your street or a smaller area.

To target local keywords, some actions you should take are:

Include important keywords and your target location in your post headline. For instance, that could be “tax lawyer in Florida.”

Have your location and keywords in at least one of the headings.

If you have a picture on your page (which you should), you should also include your keyword and location in the alt text.

These keywords should also appear in the body of your post.

Your targeted keywords should also include “near me” searches which Google usually see as a location-based search.

In some cases, a potential customer might just be driving through a city and needs to eat at a restaurant or buy coffee or have an urgent need.

Targeting these keywords enables these searchers to find you and do business with you.

While trying to add these keywords, you must make sure that you don’t stuff your post with keywords.

Doing this would give your visitors headache rather than solve their problems.

And you’ll lose the rank you’ve worked hard to gain.

Hauser-Ross Eye Institute and Surgicenter is a regional eye care provider. Their aim was to improve their local search traffic and the number of procedures.

Some of its strategies were to conduct keyword research and use geo-targeted keywords which took advantage of people who were looking for a provider nearby.

With this campaign, they were able to get a 52.8% increase in organic traffic, 33.5% increase in procedures, and 333% increase in revenue in January which was usually a slow month.

6. Optimize for voice search

Over the years, voice search has been growing in popularity. More people are using voice search on their smartphones.

Likewise, there are now devices like Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod that are built to exploit the functionality of voice search.

One of the reasons voice search has grown in popularity over the years is that devices can now detect voice with the accuracy of a human.

If I have to search for a restaurant while on the move or check if a restaurant is still open, voice search will be the easiest option.

If you’re running a business, you should take this into account. One advantage voice search also has on typed search is that it’s easier.

With this ease, voice search tends to be longer than typed search as a search engine user can say more in the same type it takes them to type a search query.

How does voice search look like? It looks like conversations. People perform voice search like asking another person a question.

In fact, in a study by BrightLocal, 56% of respondents had used voice search on their smartphones to find information for a local business in the past 12 months, 28% on a desktop, 20% on a tablet, and 18% on a smart speaker.

To optimize for voice search on your website, there are some important factors to consider:

Conversational copy

If you have conversational copywriting on your website, then you can reap its benefits for voice search. If you’re selling a product or offering a service, how do you think people will perform a voice search for it?

For instance, a question like “where can I get coffee?” could be an important voice search term if you’re selling coffee. Because searchers could say that in a voice search while looking for a coffee shop.

It would make a difference if you include such a question in your blog post.

Long-tail keywords

With the nature of voice search, it’s usually longer than typed search. Research by Ido Guy at Yahoo! revealed that 34.5% of voice queries were 5 words or more compared to 21.2% of text queries.

To optimize your blog content for voice search, it is important to target long-tail keywords that resemble questions your potential customers may ask.

7. Use Schema markups

Search engines are intelligent. But it won’t hurt if you help search engines find details about your business.

Schema markups allow you to display important information like opening hours, promotional offers, address, telephone number, and other important details.

Without clicking through to your website on the search results page, searchers can get the most important details they need to contact you or get to your business location.

If you implement schema markups, it gives you an edge over your competitors on the search results page. You’re able to improve your click-through rate (CTR) on search results page which is a positive signal to search engines.

You can learn how to implement schema markups on your website in this post about SEO tactics you need to implement.

Very few websites implement these markups and that’s why you should do it.

Conclusion

While thinking about search engine optimization, it is important to implement strategies that would attract as many customers as possible from your vicinity.

This is because it’s more convenient for these people to do business with you. In some other cases, they probably need your service urgently.

However, while it’s important to optimize your website for local search, your website must be easy to use with clear content, simple design, and proper navigation.

Implement these strategies to improve local SEO today and you can capture more customers from your area. And more profits.