Local SEO: How To Rank Your Local Business

SEO plays a very vital role in increasing your reach on global and local level. Though it is to keep in mind that Local SEO is very different from the average global SEO and the campaign must be drafted accordingly.
Here are some tools to help your Local Business;

1. Google My Business

Google My business is another tool by Google that lets you take control on how your business will be visualised by the customers. You can manage your updates, listings, build a website and engage your customers easily from your mobile, desktop, laptop or tablet for free.

In order to increase your local reach, you need to have a ‘My Business’ account. After you have finished the setup process, you must include these things:

(i) a long, unique description with relevant links and no mistakes.
(ii)Choose the right categories for your business.
(iii) Add a lot of photos
(iv) Add  your local phone number, so people can reach you if required
(v) Add your office address (Or the one you’ve put on your website)
(vi) Use High resolution pictures Profile and cover photo.
(vii)Include the working hours. Add when office opens and when ends. (viii)Get honest reviews and feedbacks from the customers.

2. NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number)

NAPs are what you need the most; for people to find you and reach you offline. As it suggests, N stands for the name of the business, A stands for the address of the business and P stands for Phone number allotted to the business. When you put this information on the website, it becomes easier to find you. While adding NAPs, make sure that it appears in the footer of every single webpage of your website in exact same format. You can also use schema.org markup on your NAP, so search engines can fetch all the required information.

3. Local Reviews

Local reviews are directly linked to your rank.The more reviews you have, the better your ranking gets. So, you might want to get in touch with your customers, who’re very regular in your business and ask them to review you on the Google reviews as well as on the Yelp page. Yelp pages are used by Apple maps. In order to get reviews from the customers, you can also use some tricks like returning the favour by giving them a discount, or a coupon card. You can also add a webpage ‘Review us’ or ‘Feedbacks’ on your site that instructs people how to review your business or services on Google Reviews and Yelp pages. You can write detailed steps embedded with screenshots, so it becomes easier for your non tech-savvy customers to understand the process and follow it, which might end up in getting a new review and rating for your business.

4. On- page SEO factors

On-page SEO factors are basically the factors that helps boosting up the SEO, mentioned on the page. According to a study by Nifty marketing, an Idaho based marketing company that have an upper hand in ‘Local Searches’ mentioning these things on your page, in the specific locations will help with the ranking of your page.
Try to add relevant keywords, location (City/Region) within the Title tag, H1 tag, URL, content and Alt attribute of image of your landing page.( A landing page is where your visitors are diverted after clicking on the link.) Embedding Google maps with a marker to your landing is also a good idea, as it’ll help your visitors to reach your doorstep. Google maps, with the help of the marker you’ll put, will navigate people in order to reach your Business address. Also, make sure that your website is mobile friendly as well.

5. Citations

‘Citations’ is mentioning the NAPs (Name, Address and Phone number) of your business, online. You can use Bright to find all the citations you have and then update them so they are all consistent. With this tool, you can also keep a track of your competitor’s citations and add yours on the same websites as well. You can use a service like White spark which helps you to find and upload local citations. Moz website lets you manually submit your citations and browse extensive list of citations. Tools like Ahrefs, majestic,etc. lets you run a competitive research in order to find citations gained by your competitors. You can also use Google Alerts or Mentions to track new mentions of your competitors.

6. Local Link Building

Link building is a crucial step in order to rank up your SEO, as backlinks and citations work as a trust worthy source. For building up links you can:-Go to Meetup.com to search local relevant events and contact them about sponsorship, if they have websites.
-Reach out to local press in order to get coverage and create a resource using public data.
-Create your own local meetup or event and bring links from the local event page.
-Get your interviews lined up with online publication in the related field.
-Offer a discount to local organizers in exchange for a mentioned link.

7. SERP Click through Rate

SERP is an acronym for Search engine response page. It’s used as one of Google’s core QualityScoremeasures. You can try the following, to maximise your SERP CTR:

• Have your Schema.org markup set up.
• Have a readable and relevant title.
• Write a detailed meta description, that suits target reader’s tastes.