When it comes to a business – any business – sustainability is the most important thing. Growth is awesome, but it has to be sustainable. A high sales rate is great but if it is not sustainable then it won’t matter. If you wish to achieve long-term success then you have to whatever you create has to be sustainable. One of the best ways to this is through local SEO. It will assure that you are on top in local search results.
In a world ruled by keywords, you have to make sure that you have a seat at the table. Big corporations spend tons of money ranking for the top industry keywords. This makes it quite tough to compete with them. However you can compete in a different area – local SEO. In fact, you have to compete in local SEO. Local SEO is not lenient though, you must set it up right at the start so here are some local SEO tips to help you.
Get your business listed on Google.
Get your business listed on Google
You have to do this as soon as possible. Being listed on Google will do wonders for your business. In spite of what you might believe, Google wants your business to be discovered and are there to help you. Google will guide you through the steps to get your business locally listed (just be sure to choose the correct category curing the setup process).
Select the proper tile tags
This is probably the easiest thing you can do to impact your search rankings greatly. Make sure to include local SEO information when you fill out the titles on your web pages. This is an important piece of code. Remember that Google does not rank websites, they rank separate pages. This makes it vital for you to localize each page in order to impact organic search results. The best format to make use of is “Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword/Brand name”.
Get listed in the correct directory
Ideally you want to get listed in high quality online directories that are used by your industry. These directories will help greatly with your search ranking. The simplest version is to go to “Moz local”, you can also consider applying to Bing and Yahoo.
Use Google+
Be sure to create a Google+ page and keep it as active as possible. The activity on your Google+ page is weighed differently than that of other social media platforms. Google+ works great for rankings since it was specifically designed for SEO. Use Google+ similarly to Facebook and also encourage customers to give reviews. The reviews on a Google+ business page are a strong local SEO tool.
Location pages
You should build geo-targeted location pages which targets the top locations that your business serves. This will increase your rank for certain locations over time. In the title tag, be sure to add the actual location in the URL, also make sure you use the city/town name a couple of times on the page. You can add any number of location pages you desire, but ultimately it is best to build pages for your main target areas and focus specially on those.
NAP
Make sure you have NAP on your mobile page.
NAP – Name, Address, Phone number. This information should be somewhere highly visible on your homepage such as the header, footer or menu. You should also make sure to have NAP on your mobile page. Similarly, make sure NAP is on each and every one of your pages, if you have just one location. This will keep you in front of your customers while they check out your online presence. They can contact you at any time they wish. Another useful tool is placing a Google map on your page which allows customers to navigate from their location to your business. Besides boosting your search rank, this is a useful service to the user.
Each major corporation started off by reigning over their local area and now you can follow that same path by making use of these local SEO tips.