Having a local SEO strategy is place is essential to attracting more clients to your business, irrespective of whether you a nationally-based chain or a single store front. In order to increase the chances of prospects finding about your business in local search results, you need to optimizes particular aspects of your website.
Search engines are constantly on the alert and looking for certain signals, among these, social profile pages, local content, citations and links to provide their users with relevant search results. You should really try to optimize the following areas as much as possible in order to elevate local search signal to a whole new level. These are the external citations/links, local profile pages and on-page.
On-page signals
You would need to set up your address, name and phone number with local area code to make it easy for both search engines and people to discover you. These details should be available on your website as easy to crawl HTML. Try to avoid the all too common mistake of including the details in an image. Search engines cannot crawl images the way they do HTML.
Once you are done with this, concentrate on publishing locally relevant content. Establish yourself as an authority in your type of business, in your area. Engage in industry gatherings, publish news and other content of educational nature on your blog.
Local profile pages
Ensure you have a local Google+ page for all of your business locations and use Google Mapmaker to remove duplicate listings. It is common for employees to make duplicate listing without knowing these already exist.
Having a system for creating customer reviews can be also very advantageous. If you don’t know where to start with this, use the review handout generator by Whitespark.
Don’t forget to optimize your business categories! The local profiles at Google+ grant business owners the option to state the type of their business category. According to one local SEO Toronto company, you should include no less than 5 categories that relate to your type of business. These must include both specific and broad categories.
Citations and inbound links
While you may already know what inbound links are, citations are a little different. These occur when other websites mention your business name and address. Both external links to your site and citations are important for your local SEO.
In order to receive more of these, ensure that your business address is consistent throughout the web. Your local SEO requires the consistency of your address, business name and phone numbers.
Your local search presence will also benefit from more local links. While you have limited control over this, try to earn as many local links as possible. One strategy for doing this is to try to create worthy content people would want to link to.
This guide is meant to improve the SEO of your local business. While some of the activities are one-off tasks, others, like publishing locally relevant content and building reviews, you should perform on a regular basis.
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1OQPiTY via transformational marketing
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