If you’re a local business catering to clients in the area, then you should take advantage of local SEO as a quick way to rank for searches in your region.
But how do you build your local SEO? Glad you asked.
Why local SEO?
Simply put, working on local SEO is like a mini growth hack that you can execute very easily. It basically allows you to quickly rank higher for certain (localized queries) in your region and get ahead of your competition.
This also allows you to rank faster on Google.
Local SEO leads to general SEO growth
At the same time, you can eventually leverage this local SEO growth to grow into a more global scale. I’m not saying that you should do this early in your SEO journey but perfecting your local SEO actually makes the process of ranking for global search queries (for lack of a better term) a lot faster.
Ten tips on how to grow your local SEO
- Create a Google my Business page and optimize it for search
- Create listings and local citations in as many platforms as you can
- Gather online reviews as much as you can
- Make sure your listings have the same details throughout
- Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly
- Add location and map on your website
- Create local SEO content
- Engage on social media
- Improve your internal linking structure
I’m not going into every single one of these tips, but they all serve around the same purpose: telling Google that you’re a successful business in your local area.
Create online listings and local citations and make sure they’re regularly updated
Firstly, make sure that your business is in many different listings (especially local directories) and social media platforms.
By creating business listings in directories like Google, Yelp and others directories in your niche, you’re basically indicating that you exist within this city, and this helps you on your local SEO.
And it also gives your free backlinks. Win-win.
Here’s a list of UK websites you can already create a business listing in:
You need to create an overview of all the listings that your business is present in, because it can quickly become hard to manage. Be consistent and update all your listings once a small change happens, or Google will deem you as untrustworthy.
In the same vein, as business listings indicate your location, you’ll also end up building your local citations, which are any local mention of your business or address.
Optimize your website for search
Afterwards, it’s time to make sure that your website is optimized for search. Make sure that your loading times are relatively fast (it should take your website less than 10 seconds to load a page at most), and that you have a Contact orAbout me page that includes your address and the map of your location. Again, local SEO.
You also need to improve your internal linking structure. This allows Google to identify your pages and content pieces as interconnected.Here is a case study on how NinjaOutreachincreased their traffic by 40% in two months through an internal linking strategy.
Get online reviews
Online reviews can actually greatly affect your SEO and your search rankings, for good and bad. I know that asking for reviews is easier said than done, but if your business is really top-notch, then you should not have any problems getting them if you politely ask (and maybe add a discount to your services to incentivise them to actually do a 5-star review).
Here are some platforms to build your online reputation through 5-star reviews:
Trustpilot and Google Are arguably the two most important platforms when it comes to online reviews.
Create great SEO content
Once you’ve built your local citations and created listings in many different directories, it’s time to create great SEO content. Now how do you create great SEO content? Read my quick guide to SEO writing, but here are some steadfast tips:
1/ Have an angle
Creating value isn’t enough. You need an angle. If it’s an existing niche, then go even deeper than that. The reason behind this is that the mortgage industry can be quite competitive, so you need to go niche in order to stand out and rank on Google.
2/ Include targeted keywords and local queries
You need to include targeted keywords your clients search for and rank for them. If there’s enough search volume (you can use Google’s Keyword Planner for that), write on those topics.
3/ Create value
Of course, you need to create value in order to have them convert. Conversion happens when you exceed all their expectations and produce fresh content that is full of personality and value.
4/ Have a personality
No one wants to read content with no flavour or personality. Think of this as branding. In order to stand out, you need to look and sound different.
5/ Add enticing visual media
Visual and audio media helps encourage people to stay longer on your website. Anything that encourages your visitors to consume content helps with your SEO,
6/ Measure, analyze and iterate
Of course, creating great content is like building a product. Over time, as more people read what you have to say, you get an intuition of what people like.
This is the final step to making sure that you find your angle and succeed in creating great content, data analysis. Analytics is your friend. Make sure that you measure various data points to figure out what type of content converts and what does not.
The data should lead to where you want to be, but for that to happen you need humility and to cut off things that are not working.
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Hope these help :D. If you need any help on SEO, do let me know. I’m sure that you will start to see initial results once you’ve acted on these tips!
