Nearly 64% of shoppers admit to using their phones to research local products and services before purchasing.
When we compare this to the finding that 70% of local consumers trust online business reviews or that, 11- 15% of businesses have claimed their Google Places local listings, we see a lot of potential customers that are yet untapped.
Any business that gets some or all of its customers or clients locally should consider local SEO. The business could be a local restaurant, retail outlet; doctor’s, dentist or lawyer’s office, or just as easily be a local ad agency.
If you have a physical address in a city and expect people to go there, you should get Local SEO covered for that location.
To most people getting ‘Local SEO covered’ looks easier said than done, so we put together a list of the Local SEO services that we QualDev Inc., provide our customers.
Check out the below guide to optimize your website for local search and improve your website visibility:
Perform Competitors Analysis (Local or National)
Unless you are offering a groundbreaking new product or a niche-carving service, you are bound to have competitors who are snapping at your heels if not already ahead of you by miles.
Whether you are a new entrant or an established business house, the task of garnering a respectable online market share in a crowded marketplace is a difficult task.
We carry out a thorough analysis of all keywords the competition use. We then apply necessary changes to help your website achieve better rankings on search-engine result pages for the same set of keywords.
Our specialized process helps us understand the strategies your competitors employ. This in turn enables us to reposition your website’s SEO strategies, so that it scores over your competitors in search engine rankings.
Perform Keyword Research and Marketplace Research
The first step when starting an online marketing campaign involves keyword research, to ensure that you target the correct terms necessary for directing your campaign to success.
However, making sure you select the right keywords can be difficult, as you need to consider many factors simultaneously.
With our keyword services, we help identify the right keywords for your business, so that the traffic directed to your website is relevant, resulting in more conversions.
Selecting the right keywords is not just a case of knowing which keywords are searched for the most and with the greatest volume but a case of finding those with the right intent, that will send paying customers to your website and improve your bottom line.
With our keyword research service, we look at all the possible keywords in your industry to find those terms that will provide high numbers of qualified traffic in line with your business goals.
Onpage Optimization For Local Search
During this phase, we incorporate the keywords you selected into existing pages or new pages created on your website. Here we adjust keyword saturation and density (2-3%) to suit requirements that help achieve top 10 ranking.
This process involves modifying and optimizing vital areas of your site’s source code, making and implementing several level adjustments to guarantee that your site is search engine friendly.
We focus on important factors, like
- Keyword density, relevancy, synonyms and position
- Page markup key-phrase factors including syntactical accuracy, page code structure, title tags, meta tags, hyperlink tags, and image alt tags
- H1/H2/H3 HTML Tags
- Canonical home page issues (Duplication of URL)
XML and HTML sitemaps: creation, implementation
XML and HTML sitemap files are simple files that contain information about important URLs on your website. The information stored in these files help search engine robots better spider your site.
We create Geo XML sitemap, that includes your company details and link it to your live website as well as add the geo sitemap in Google webmaster tools; and HTML sitemaps that provide users with direct links to individual category and product pages on your websites.
Robots.txt: creation, implementation, optimization
The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web crawlers and other web robots from accessing all or parts of a website that is otherwise not publicly viewable.
This ensures that users do not get links to irrelevant pages, like a blank page or something that says you do not have permission to view from the search engine results they rely on.
This type of experience can be frustrating and in all likelihood when you faced a similar situation, you clicked the back button on your web browser quite quickly.
With robots.txt optimization, we submit only important pages with actual information for indexing by search engines.
Robots.txt creation and robots.txt optimization mean that the important pages on your website have better chances to make it to the top of the search results page, while pages that should remain hidden do not eat into the ranking.
When robots ‘crawl’ this file, they are informed and know exactly what to look at and what not to look at.
Add Rich snippets code for your business on the site
Snippets — the few lines of text that appear under every search result—are designed to give users a sense for what is on the page and why it is relevant to their query.
We use structured data testing tool to make sure that Google can read and extract your marked-up data to provide relevant information in snippets.
Create Google My Business Page
According to GlobalWebIndex, 97% of consumers search for local businesses online.
This means that your business information needs to be readily available to all search engines. A Google My Business Page allows your customers to find your business profile on Google which contains your business hours, address, phone number, much more information regarding your business all in one place.
This information is displayed within a Google Search, so you want to make sure your information is accurate and up to date.
Claiming your business profile on Google My Business is a positive step to boost your visibility to get reviews. Having a positive rating can help to elevate your business in search results, especially on sites that allow visitors to sort businesses by the number of positive ratings.
Claim Your Profile On Reputed Business Listing Sites
Promoting your business in your own city, state or country is an important part of local SEO.
These effects are very helpful as they provide prospective customers in your locality who are looking for the services and products you provide online, with information by advertising your business effectively.
Local Press Releases
Press release still helps companies get media coverage over blogs and podcasts and provide SEO benefits. Boosting your company’s visibility is especially important for small businesses, but even large corporations need to fight for consumer mindshare.
By implementing a press release distribution strategy, you let customers know who you are, what you do, and why they need you. You also gain the attention of journalists, and over time, they start to trust you more and give you more media coverage.
Our content copywriters prepare press releases and distribute them on Local Press Release websites, providing information about the products or services you lunch.
Reputation Management & Social Media
We use a customized program we created to connect to and manage all your social media profiles from one portal. This helps to manage and monitor your reputation online and gauge the effect of the SEO efforts both Local and Organic.
This also means we are able to steer our SEO efforts towards ensuring an increase positive reviews and ratings and in turn – in conversion rates on your website.
Analyze the Website Performance Regularly
Analyzing your website performance on regular interval helps gauge the effect of the SEO efforts by providing statistic and quantified results.
Our Performance Analysis includes reports like local search ranking report, local visitors report, local traffic report on a monthly basis.
Our team of SEO experts is experienced and in touch with the latest trends and practices that popular search engines follow and look forward to every opportunity to prove that they deliver quality results with each project.