local SEO stands for local search engine optimization, which is the art of optimizing your website to be found in google local search results or on google
maps.
In this article I’m going to run through 10 local SEO tips you can easily implement yourself, even if you’re a complete beginner, so your website gets the traffic that it deserves.
Here is the first website for a handyman called phoenix handyman home repair.
If I click on the “handyman services” tab, you can see they’ve bundled all their services onto one page.
While it doesn’t seem to be a bad idea, it’s not very helpful to search engines, especially Google which will struggle to understand exactly what this business is able to provide.
There is not enough details and very little room for using additional keywords people might be searching for.
Let’s look at another example of a handyman located also in phoenix.
Hovering on the service tab shows the list of all the services they provide to start with, but if i then drill down on each and every one of those pages, they are full of useful content which is going to be great for ranking purposes.
There are plenty of keywords these guys can be found for, which is not going to be the case in the first example.
That’s the reason why it’s extremely important you add multiple pages to your website, so you can be found for the terms you are targeting.
To understand how important this concept is, here is another example for two dentists located in palm springs this time.
Let’s start with the first one called leg dental palm springs.
Clearly, these guys have decided to go very minimalist and have only built three pages for their website.
A home page, an about us page and a contact us page.
They have decided to add their services on their homepage instead of creating a dedicated page for each service separately.
I think this is a big mistake and a missed opportunity.
If I look at their SEO ranking performance in one of my SEO tools, you can see their rankings are pretty awful.
They only seem to rank for a handful of keywords in the top 10 Google search results and their best performing keyword is for “leg dental palm springs” which is the name of their dental practice.
Let’s have a look at another example for another dentist in palm spring called psdentist.com.
These guys have built a specific page for each and every one of the services they provide as you
can see here in the screenshot.
This is paying off big time and is reflected in the performance of their website.
If check their rankings, they have actually collected a number of position one across many many keywords and for a broad range of them.
And here is the kicker.
if I go into google and search for “teeth whitening palm springs“, they rank number one in the google map pack.
Additionally, It’s also mentioned they do teeth whitening in the listing itself.
This is the reason why you need to build dedicated pages on your website for the services or products that you offer.
You will multiply the opportunities of being found and generate more traffic as a result. Time to move on to our local SEO tip number two.
Here is an example for this electrician’s website.
If I hover on the tab of the browser, you can see it says “electrician in London on call 24 hours a day From Aspect“.
But the definition also says
If I go back to what I can see for this website in Google, you can see the same title shows up here in the search results.
Moreover, if you visit the developer.google.com page about Meta titles, you will see that meta titles send important signals to search engines.
That’s why it’s important you include the right keywords in them so they send the right signals.
The page even specified you should avoid vague descriptions like “home” for your home page or “profile” for a specific person’s profile.
Let me show you an example of how badly this has been done on a dry cleaning website located in Massachusetts.
If I check these guys meta titles for the home page of their website, sure enough, it just says “home” and the name of the brand.
Evidently, nobody is going to be searching for either of those keywords.
It’s unlikely these guys are going to be ranking for the keywords they’re targeting.
If I check the various pages on their websites, they all follow the very same pattern.
They mention the service provided along with the name of the brand.
Let me show you another example where it’s been done very, once again for a dry cleaning eco-friendly company located in San Diego.
If I hover on the browser tab of the home page you can see it says “San Diego’s best green dry cleaner and laundry service”.
Here we have multiple keywords that are being integrated directly in the meta title such as, San Diego dry cleaner and laundry service.
If you do this and review all your pages and optimize our meta titles, I am pretty sure there is a great chance your visibility will increase almost overnight.
Here is a website for a lawyer who offers plenty of services including, personal injury.
Let’s say they want to optimize their website and rank better for the term “personal injury claims”.
One trick you can use is to look for content on the website across the pages and search for that very word.
If it’s mentioned anywhere, turn it into a link which you will then point to that very page.
Let me show you how you can easily do this.
This is going to search on Google for the keyword “personal injury claim” across all the pages available on this website.
If I click on the very first results do a search on the page for “personal injury claim” you can see that word is mentioned three times.
All you need to do is turn these little phrases into links that will point directly to the relevant page.
It will boost the authority of that page for that term helping it to rank higher in google and drive more traffic to your website.
You can do this for any word on any page.
Whenever someone is searching for a local business in google, they generally type the service or product that they’re looking for in the Google search box, followed by the name of the city, town or neighbourhood in which they want to find the nearest provider.
That’s why it’s important you include the right keyword as part of your content including the actual city, or location where your business is trying to attract customers.
There are some key places within your website where you should add that information.
Let me show you an example of a landscape gardener based in Wichita who has optimized the homepage of his website page very well with their location information key areas I’ve already mentioned.
Let me break it down for you starting with, the page title. If I hover on the tab as we’ve already seen before, you can see the location information has been added to the page title. Since the page title is a key element when it
comes to local SEO and the signals that you send to Google, it’s super important you add your location to it.
Additionally, it’s also visible in the headline. The headline is also a very important aspect of optimization when it comes to your website so consider adding your location information in there too.
It’s also mentioned as part of one of their testimonials and other areas within the home page.
Overall the location is mentioned seven times throughout the page making it easy to Google to understand this business is located in Wichita.
You should also consider adding the location keyword within the description of your page which is what’s going to show in google search results. So when people are looking for a business like yours, the location will show in the results itself which means, searchers are more likely to click on it.
Creating a google listing will help your business be found on google search results, on google maps results and drive traffic to your website.
I won’t linger too much on this topic because I believe most of you have already created your own listing.
If you haven’t and you don’t know where to start, go and check my video “Google My Business Listing Set Up – 2021 Step By Step Tutorial For Best Results”
All you need to do is make sure you create a listing for your business so it can show up on Bing map.
There are three good reasons why you should create a listing on Bing.
Reason n#1, it is totally free. Reason N#2 It takes no time to set up if you’ve already set up a google my business listing.
Let me show you how.
And half that population will have an apple map app installed by default on their iPhone.
A lot of these people will be using it to search for local businesses.
That’s why it’s important to add your business to apple maps.
Let me show you how you can do that.
Head over to google and search for a keyword that you’re trying to rank your business for. Let’s say I’m a plumber and I want to rank for “boiler repair near me”, then click on search.
Just below the AdWords results, you should see a list of other results available in certain directories for this keyword. In this instance, we can see Checkatrade, Gumtree and Yell
if your business is not listed in those directories, make sure you add it. It will generate more traffic.
Links from organisations you are members of such as an approved body that regulates your industry.
Here is an example of an electrician who is part of the NICIEC which regulates the training and the work of electrical services in the UK and got listed directly on their website.
If you’re not part of any association or official organisation you can reach out to your local chamber of commerce and get your business listed on their site.
Another easy way to get a link is by getting in touch getting in touch with local bloggers who might be happy to add you on their website as you are part of the local community (as long as you give them a good reason to do so)
There are plenty of other options you should consider. This is just a tiny sample of what is easily achievable without breaking a sweat.
They are simple to implement and will result in much-improved visibility of your business in Google local search results and an increase in web traffic.
As part of the many features available within your Google My Business Dashboard, there is an option called insights.
This features provides access to data that measures how efficient your google my business listing is.
When optimizing your website for local search, your google my business listing visibility and rankings on Google maps should improve with it too.
This is something you will be able to identify using your Google My Business insights.
The second tool I recommend is Google Search Console.
Google Search Console helps you monitor your site presence in Google search results.
It’s full of super-rich valuable information and more specifically
how well you’re ranking for what keyword.
And finally, Google analytics.
This will give you details about the performance of the activity on your website which you should check regularly.
That’s it I’m not going to spend a huge amount of time dwelling on these analytics tools.
You should make a regular slot in your schedule to check these at least once a week to see whether or not you’re making improvements.
Apply these 10 tips and you should see the visibility of your site improve drastically.
Local SEO Tip N#1 – Create Dedicated Website Pages
Make sure you create a dedicated web page on your site for each product that you sell or each service that you provide. Why? because it will give you additional chances of being found in google for keywords related to the product or services that you sell. Let me show you an example with a couple of handymen I have found in Phoenix Arizona.Here is the first website for a handyman called phoenix handyman home repair.
If I click on the “handyman services” tab, you can see they’ve bundled all their services onto one page.
While it doesn’t seem to be a bad idea, it’s not very helpful to search engines, especially Google which will struggle to understand exactly what this business is able to provide.
There is not enough details and very little room for using additional keywords people might be searching for.
Let’s look at another example of a handyman located also in phoenix.
Hovering on the service tab shows the list of all the services they provide to start with, but if i then drill down on each and every one of those pages, they are full of useful content which is going to be great for ranking purposes.
There are plenty of keywords these guys can be found for, which is not going to be the case in the first example.
That’s the reason why it’s extremely important you add multiple pages to your website, so you can be found for the terms you are targeting.
To understand how important this concept is, here is another example for two dentists located in palm springs this time.
Let’s start with the first one called leg dental palm springs.
Clearly, these guys have decided to go very minimalist and have only built three pages for their website.
A home page, an about us page and a contact us page.
They have decided to add their services on their homepage instead of creating a dedicated page for each service separately.
I think this is a big mistake and a missed opportunity.
If I look at their SEO ranking performance in one of my SEO tools, you can see their rankings are pretty awful.
They only seem to rank for a handful of keywords in the top 10 Google search results and their best performing keyword is for “leg dental palm springs” which is the name of their dental practice.
Let’s have a look at another example for another dentist in palm spring called psdentist.com.
These guys have built a specific page for each and every one of the services they provide as you
can see here in the screenshot.
This is paying off big time and is reflected in the performance of their website.
If check their rankings, they have actually collected a number of position one across many many keywords and for a broad range of them.
And here is the kicker.
if I go into google and search for “teeth whitening palm springs“, they rank number one in the google map pack.
Additionally, It’s also mentioned they do teeth whitening in the listing itself.
This is the reason why you need to build dedicated pages on your website for the services or products that you offer.
You will multiply the opportunities of being found and generate more traffic as a result. Time to move on to our local SEO tip number two.
Local SEO Tip N#2 – Optimize the Meta Titles of Your Pages
This one is so simple and yet overlooked by so many businesses. If you don’t know what meta titles are here is a quick definition I have found on google which I think summarizes it quite well:A meta title is an important part of website optimization, and it’s distinct from the headline on the page itself. It acts as a name tag for the web page. The title is displayed on your browser tab and tells you what page you’re on.
Here is an example for this electrician’s website.
If I hover on the tab of the browser, you can see it says “electrician in London on call 24 hours a day From Aspect“.
But the definition also says
Meta titles are also read by search engine robots and seen by users searching the web. Because of this, it’s important to use a title that is strong for search engines, yet makes sense to humans surfing the web
If I go back to what I can see for this website in Google, you can see the same title shows up here in the search results.
Moreover, if you visit the developer.google.com page about Meta titles, you will see that meta titles send important signals to search engines.
That’s why it’s important you include the right keywords in them so they send the right signals.
The page even specified you should avoid vague descriptions like “home” for your home page or “profile” for a specific person’s profile.
Let me show you an example of how badly this has been done on a dry cleaning website located in Massachusetts.
If I check these guys meta titles for the home page of their website, sure enough, it just says “home” and the name of the brand.
Evidently, nobody is going to be searching for either of those keywords.
It’s unlikely these guys are going to be ranking for the keywords they’re targeting.
If I check the various pages on their websites, they all follow the very same pattern.
They mention the service provided along with the name of the brand.
Let me show you another example where it’s been done very, once again for a dry cleaning eco-friendly company located in San Diego.
If I hover on the browser tab of the home page you can see it says “San Diego’s best green dry cleaner and laundry service”.
Here we have multiple keywords that are being integrated directly in the meta title such as, San Diego dry cleaner and laundry service.
If you do this and review all your pages and optimize our meta titles, I am pretty sure there is a great chance your visibility will increase almost overnight.
Local SEO Tip N#3 – Turn Your Content into Powerful Links
if you’re new to local SEO you may not know that links play a huge part in the visibility of your website in google search results. There are two types of links, external links and internal links.External links
External links are links that point to your website from other websites across the web. They’re generally quite difficult to get.Internal links
Internal links are links you’re completely in control of. The benefit of internal links is that you can customise them and make them work for the keywords that you are targeting let me show you what I mean.Here is a website for a lawyer who offers plenty of services including, personal injury.
Let’s say they want to optimize their website and rank better for the term “personal injury claims”.
One trick you can use is to look for content on the website across the pages and search for that very word.
If it’s mentioned anywhere, turn it into a link which you will then point to that very page.
Let me show you how you can easily do this.
- Go to google and search for google advanced.
- Type the exact word or phrase that you are trying to locate on the content of your website. Let’s use “personal injury claim”
- Add the website address of your site in the site or domain field. In this instance, I’m just going to copy and paste the lawyer’s website address.
- Click on advanced search.
This is going to search on Google for the keyword “personal injury claim” across all the pages available on this website.
If I click on the very first results do a search on the page for “personal injury claim” you can see that word is mentioned three times.
All you need to do is turn these little phrases into links that will point directly to the relevant page.
It will boost the authority of that page for that term helping it to rank higher in google and drive more traffic to your website.
You can do this for any word on any page.
Local SEO Tip N#4 – Add Your Location in Key Parts of Your Site
Whenever someone is searching for a local business in google, they generally type the service or product that they’re looking for in the Google search box, followed by the name of the city, town or neighbourhood in which they want to find the nearest provider.
That’s why it’s important you include the right keyword as part of your content including the actual city, or location where your business is trying to attract customers.
There are some key places within your website where you should add that information.
Let me show you an example of a landscape gardener based in Wichita who has optimized the homepage of his website page very well with their location information key areas I’ve already mentioned.
Let me break it down for you starting with, the page title. If I hover on the tab as we’ve already seen before, you can see the location information has been added to the page title. Since the page title is a key element when it
comes to local SEO and the signals that you send to Google, it’s super important you add your location to it.
Additionally, it’s also visible in the headline. The headline is also a very important aspect of optimization when it comes to your website so consider adding your location information in there too.
It’s also mentioned as part of one of their testimonials and other areas within the home page.
Overall the location is mentioned seven times throughout the page making it easy to Google to understand this business is located in Wichita.
You should also consider adding the location keyword within the description of your page which is what’s going to show in google search results. So when people are looking for a business like yours, the location will show in the results itself which means, searchers are more likely to click on it.
Local SEO Tip N#5 – Create a Google My Business Listing
I wasn’t sure whether or not I should include this as part of the list because if you are reading this article, I assume that most of you I’ve already done it. If you haven’t, please do it today. If that’s the only thing that you do then be it.Creating a google listing will help your business be found on google search results, on google maps results and drive traffic to your website.
I won’t linger too much on this topic because I believe most of you have already created your own listing.
If you haven’t and you don’t know where to start, go and check my video “Google My Business Listing Set Up – 2021 Step By Step Tutorial For Best Results”
Local SEO Tip N#6 – Create a Business Listing on Bing
If you don’t know what bing is, it is the search engine that has been developed and created by Microsoft to compete with Google. Although it’s nowhere near as popular as Google, it can still drive a significant amount of visitors to your website.All you need to do is make sure you create a listing for your business so it can show up on Bing map.
There are three good reasons why you should create a listing on Bing.
Reason n#1, it is totally free. Reason N#2 It takes no time to set up if you’ve already set up a google my business listing.
Let me show you how.
- Step 1: Go to Bing places dashboard
- Step 2: If it’s the first time you’re using Bing for a business click on the “import the data from Google My Business Now” button if you’ve created a listing on Google.
- Step 3: Click on “import from google my business” and follow the process.
Local SEO Tip N#7 – Add Your Business to Apple Maps
Do you own an iPhone? if you do, it means you are part of half the population who owns a mobile phone.And half that population will have an apple map app installed by default on their iPhone.
A lot of these people will be using it to search for local businesses.
That’s why it’s important to add your business to apple maps.
Let me show you how you can do that.
- Step 1 head over to google and search for “add your business to apple maps“
- Step 2: Click on the link that says “Get started – Places on Maps – Apple Business Register”
- Step 3: Click on the “got it” button to acknowledge the first popup then type your business name in the main box to see whether or not your business already exists on apple maps, if it does just select it and then click on a claim then follow the process. If it doesn’t then all you need to do is to add it as a missing place.
Local SEO Tip N#8 – List Your Business in Key Directories
Because of its dominance in search, Google has been legally obliged in certain countries to include external sources of information as part of its results. This comes in the form of directories. The beauty of this is, these directories sit right at the top of search results which is another opportunity for you to get more traffic for your website. Let me explain how this works.Head over to google and search for a keyword that you’re trying to rank your business for. Let’s say I’m a plumber and I want to rank for “boiler repair near me”, then click on search.
Just below the AdWords results, you should see a list of other results available in certain directories for this keyword. In this instance, we can see Checkatrade, Gumtree and Yell
if your business is not listed in those directories, make sure you add it. It will generate more traffic.
Local SEO Tip N#9 – Get Some External Links
External links are links pointing from other websites back to your website play a major part in the visibility of your business in search results. They are generally quite difficult to get but as a local business owner, there are a few links that you can easily build to your site without having to work too hard. Here are a few examples:Links from organisations you are members of such as an approved body that regulates your industry.
Here is an example of an electrician who is part of the NICIEC which regulates the training and the work of electrical services in the UK and got listed directly on their website.
If you’re not part of any association or official organisation you can reach out to your local chamber of commerce and get your business listed on their site.
Another easy way to get a link is by getting in touch getting in touch with local bloggers who might be happy to add you on their website as you are part of the local community (as long as you give them a good reason to do so)
There are plenty of other options you should consider. This is just a tiny sample of what is easily achievable without breaking a sweat.
They are simple to implement and will result in much-improved visibility of your business in Google local search results and an increase in web traffic.
Local SEO Tip N#10 – Check Your Analytics
So you’re implementing all these tips and it’s all going very well but you’re not quite sure whether or not it is working out. Remember this, “you can’t improve what you can’t measure”. Thankfully there’s plenty of tools out there you can use to understand how well you’re doing and if your performance is improving. Let’s have a look at the three tools I recommend you check regularly to make sure that, whatever you’re doing is paying off. Let’s start with Google my Business.As part of the many features available within your Google My Business Dashboard, there is an option called insights.
This features provides access to data that measures how efficient your google my business listing is.
When optimizing your website for local search, your google my business listing visibility and rankings on Google maps should improve with it too.
This is something you will be able to identify using your Google My Business insights.
The second tool I recommend is Google Search Console.
Google Search Console helps you monitor your site presence in Google search results.
It’s full of super-rich valuable information and more specifically
how well you’re ranking for what keyword.
And finally, Google analytics.
This will give you details about the performance of the activity on your website which you should check regularly.
That’s it I’m not going to spend a huge amount of time dwelling on these analytics tools.
You should make a regular slot in your schedule to check these at least once a week to see whether or not you’re making improvements.
Apply these 10 tips and you should see the visibility of your site improve drastically.
