Local SEO Services Essential To Smaller Businesses

While national SEO focuses more on ranking in searches across the country, local SEO Services prioritizes appearing on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) in a specific location. This strategy relies on marketing your brand, products, and services to local leads and customers.

Nearly half of all Google queries today are local searches. Even when someone performs a typical daily search, the chances that Google shows local businesses nearby remains high.

Local SEO Services like Google are constantly updating their algorithms (Page Rankings) to provide users with useful search results. It is important to understand how these systems work to ensure that your business is being shown to the right people who are looking for the right things.

Using local listings from Google, Yahoo and Bing are all essential tools for local SEO Services. So ensure that your business is featured on all three search engines and that you are using up to date contact information, physical address information, operation hours, and photos on your accounts. Those which are used to source the local businesses are often displayed complete with contact information and a map at the top of Google searches.

Create a Google My Business Account – Optimising your Google listing (Business Profile) is the most effective way to rank higher on Google Maps as well as gain visibility in Google Search local results. In order to gain access to your Business Profile to make these optimizations, you need a Google My Business account associated with that profile. Once you provide all of the requested information in your Google My Business account dashboard, all the information will be added to your Business Profile, which appears in Google Search local results, the Google Search Knowledge Panel, and Google Maps.

Get Regular reviews from your customers

Getting your customers to write glowing reviews for your business doesn’t just optimize your Google My Business presence but it will also encourage more local customers to buy from you.

Google Maps – Google Maps has had a makeover that has brought optimized Google pages back into the spotlight again. The viewer has the option to find business results within a Google Maps search via ‘Top reviewers’ and ‘Your circles‘. Clicking the option ‘Top reviewers’ gives you places that have been reviewed by experts on Google Business, while the option ‘Your circles’ shows places that are recommended by people in your circles.

Yahoo listing – Localworks is a service that lets you submit your business listing information to multiple directories across the Internet from one place, identify listing errors, editing listing information, track your listing performance and status, and see key business reputation information (ratings and reviews).

Bing Listing – Microsoft Bing (formerly known as Bing) is a web search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service has its origins in Microsoft’s previous search engines: MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and later Live Search. Bing provides a variety of search services, including web, video, image, and map search products

How Local SEO Services Help in Google Maps

To help you rank higher on Google Local Search via Google Maps, try to do as many of the following as possible:
• Getting regular reviews from your customers.
• Completing your Google My Business Local profile.
• Using photos of the place of the business section.
• Using accurate details for directions.

Home Page/Custom Landing Page
Having a customized landing page or home page will help rank your business better, whichever your Google My Business is linked to. The on-page Local SEO Services elements and linking profile of this landing page or home page partially decide how well you rank in local Google.

Ensure that a good number of inbound links pointing to your page from locally relevant pages, such as local forums, local review sites, local business listing sites are included on this page.
Add a blog section as well using niche content and location-based keywords.

Social Media
For local businesses, social media platforms play a big role in its local search ranking. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google My Business, and YouTube give a wide array of opportunities for positive brand exposure to your local audiences.

• Gain a large number of likes on your Social Media platform pages as possible. Try running local competitions or advertise as much as possible to gain these extra likes.
• Encourage content shares as much as possible. Local or national competitions can encourage a post to and free to register with and promote your competitions.
• Have inbound links pointing to your site from discussions on local community forums
• Use product or service-related keywords in your brand-page title or description.
• Use location-based keywords in your brand page title or description.

Optimize for Voice Search

Voice search will grow rapidly in the coming years. Therefore, in local SEO, it is important to optimize this for how people ask questions when they speak into devices, as opposed to how they type out their searches. Essentially, your customers use more long-tail keywords when doing voice searches compared with regular searches. As a result of this, you will have to adjust the Local SEO Services of your content to fit the more conversational tone of someone speaking. For example, you will want to account for the traditional question starters (who, what, when, where, why, and how).

Optimize Your Website for Mobile

Over the past few years, mobile visits to websites have increased tenfold compared to those viewed through Desktops. This confirms that you have to optimize your website for mobile to be a player in local SEO Services.

This list of local SEO Services ranking factors will help your local business rank higher in Google local. Improving some of these ranking factors may take a good amount of time and effort but they are worth doing. You must remember that improving your Google local ranking is a process that must be constantly worked on; it’s not just a one-time thing.