How Local SEO Works and Why It Matters
If you own a local company, chances are you know the value of investing in local SEO. Not only does local SEO increase website traffic, but it attracts local leads.
The biggest mistakes business owners make is thinking that local SEO is similar to digital marketing. When you look at it, you will realize that local SEO is all about optimizing the website for the search. Here's how local SEO is done:
SEO Audit and Competition Research
A successful local SEO campaign begins with a comprehensive SEO audit and competition research to identify the strength and weakness of your site. That also means paying attention to common security issues.
Auditing means going over the website and analyzing its on-page optimization, HTML, and Javascript codes. For instance, a site that's built on Javascript will need to be redesigned for the search engine to crawl and index it well.
Competition analysis is essential because it allows you to evaluate your campaign process and make adjustments. Best of all, you can reverse engineer your competitions and copy the exact strategy they are using.
We know this may sound like a lot of work. If you want to save time, you can hire local SEO experts to help you with SEO audit and competitor analysis.
Local Keyword Research
Every SEO campaign starts with keyword research. Local keyword research reveals what phrases or words your local target, search for when they want to buy something or get information.
The best strategy for mapping out keyword research is focusing on buyer intent keywords.
If you have studied and have a clue about your competitor, you will know what kind of keywords they use to rank on Google.
Content Creation and Optimization
After you have found a list of keywords for your target market, you will need to create content about them. The content is going to be in the form of pages and articles on your website.
For every content, you published on your website, make sure you stick to proper On-page optimization guidelines. On-page optimization will involve:
Page title
Meta description
Keywords within the first 100 words
Keyword within the last 100 words
H2, H3 headlines
Image or Video optimization in the content
Build Local Links
Links are votes for your website. The more links your local sites get, the higher those pages will rank for your targeted keywords. Unfortunately, not all links are equal, we have strong and weak links. Weak links come from sites that are spammy or having thin content about a particular subject.
That said, you have to get links from ''authoritative'' websites which are considered to be strong links. If you are untrained digital marketer, getting links for your local SEO campaign can be challenging.
But if you have done your competition analysis well, you'll know where your competition is getting most of their links. Once you know that, you don't need to invent the wheel. You can make an effort of getting the same links as them.
Conclusion
Local SEO and Global SEO are entirely different. It is either you do it right, or you can hire the best SEO company to help you build the links. Hiring an SEO company will save you tremendous amounts of time.