Most businesses provide their services or sell products in a limited number of cities and regions. In order to attract as much organic traffic to their site as possible, owners need to use what is called local SEO.
An example would be a company that provides a service for renting boom lifts or an online store selling building materials. It is unlikely that the owner of a boom lift rental business would benefit from sending a truck with a boom lift to another city, or that a user who needs 10 bags of cement would benefit from ordering it to be sent to another city.
The owner is interested in getting the maximum profit, and the user is interested in saving. Therefore, both will want to provide or receive their service and goods in the region in which they are located. Local SEO can help the business owner with this. Let’s take a closer look.
What is Local SEO?
About half of all queries are local queries. In addition to queries specifying a specific city, this also includes queries that include “near me,” “not far from me,” and other similar phrases.
Local SEO is a strategy that allows you to rank high in search results for queries that clearly indicate a specific location or city.
Often, the effect of promotion by local queries appears much faster than from general queries, since the competition in the search results is lower, and accordingly less time and effort is required to achieve good positions.
Local queries usually have a lower frequency than general queries. However, thanks to traffic from local queries, a site can get much more conversions than if trying to cover general queries. And local SEO allows you to get ahead of large competitors in certain regions who have monopolised the search results for general queries.
How to show a search engine that a site is relevant to a specific location and beat competitors?
There are several essential factors that you need to consider when promoting your website locally.
Google My Business
Google My Business is a Google search engine service that is essentially a directory of organisations. All organisations registered there are displayed on maps and can be displayed by the search engine in the local search block:
This block includes organisations that are close to your location.
This is one of the easiest ways to tell the search engine what region you serve customers in.
By adding your organisation, you can also provide information about yourself, your services and products, and answer users’ questions. Users can also leave reviews about your organisation, which can help a potential client contact you instead of your competitors.
An example of a well-designed organisation card with a large number of reviews:
The Google My Business card has a huge impact on your success in local organic search results. Thanks to it, the search engine gets maximum information about you, and thanks to your activity and reviews, it can get information about the quality of your services and how you work with your clients, which can be taken into account when ranking your site pages for local queries.
Local queries
When collecting the semantic core, in the process of analysing the site and niche, it is necessary to understand what potential your business has in local and global search results. If this potential is greater in local search results, then the emphasis should be on queries with a toponym and queries with the inclusion of “near me”, “near me”.
The first type of queries has very high frequencies, in some niches even higher than general queries. The situation with frequencies in the CIS countries is not very good for the second type yet, but everything is moving towards the fact that soon these queries will become no less popular than regular text queries. Therefore, it is worth considering them as well.
Local Landing Pages
If your business provides services in several regions, a good option to cover them all would be to create pages for each region. This way you can distribute queries across the site much more effectively. For example, if you are a photographer and you are ready to travel from the city you are in to two or three neighboring ones, then creating pages for each of them can help you take higher positions in local search results or, perhaps, you sell some large-sized goods, but you still deliver to neighboring regions, then creating local pages would also be a good idea.
Internal optimization
A very important part of website promotion is its internal optimization. And one of its main elements is optimization of meta-data and content.
Local SEO has its own nuances in optimising meta tags and content.
As you know, the title heading should begin with the most important and relevant search query, followed by the inclusion of auxiliary words designed to qualitatively describe the page for the user and the search engine. For local SEO, it is necessary that the title heading contain the name of the region for which the promotion is taking place:
This entry will help the search engine understand that this page is relevant to user queries in this region.
As for the content, it should also contain entries of the region in which the promoted company provides services. This is also one of the ways to show the search engine the relevance of the page to local queries.
LocalBusiness micro-markup
You can read more about what micro-markup is in our article – “What is micro-markup?”
Now we will look at a separate type of micro-markup called LocalBusiness.
This type of micro-markup allows you to mark information about your company. Phone number, address, working hours, company branches, type of payment accepted, service area, etc.
There are many subtypes of this micro-markup. You can read more about them on the website schema.org.
Let’s look at an example of LocalBusiness micro-markup.
Let’s take a restaurant website as an example:
In this example we can see the following blocks:
- address
- rating
- working hours
- price range
- types of cuisine
- telephone
- Website address
If we implement this micro-markup, for example, on a cleaning services website, then it would be logical to add a block with types of services, etc. Adapt the micro-markup to the type of your website.
By implementing this type of micro-markup into your website code, there is a chance that you will be displayed in the block with local companies:
From this block you can also get traffic to your site, which will never be superfluous.
Local Backlinks and Mentions
The volume and quality of the link mass leading to the site are very important in website promotion. For local website promotion, it is of great importance whether local high-quality and authoritative resources link to it. In order to effectively promote in local search results, it is necessary to increase such links. The easiest way to find sites is by analyzing competitors; most likely, they have links from local authoritative resources.
Also, in addition to links from local resources, mentions in local directories and reference books are important. Posting on such sites does not require much effort, and in the future it can bring quite good results, especially if the sites have a good audience and you can leave reviews on them. A good example for cafes and restaurants can be Tripadvisor. This service has influence and authority. Users can search for an establishment directly there, so presence in this directory is necessary. Also, a link from there is a good signal for the search engine.
These mentions and links can help grow brand traffic as your company becomes more popular in the regions.
In any case, the link mass needs to be increased on an ongoing basis, but if you want to rank as high as possible in local search results, you need to focus your efforts on local sites and resources.
Conclusion:
Local SEO is an important part of website optimization for businesses operating in a specific region. An essential part of it is active work with the Google My Business organisation card. Other local sites with user reviews and questions, links from local authoritative resources and directories are also taken into account. But do not forget about internal website optimization for local queries, it can increase the chances of getting into the TOP.
As practice shows, it is easier to take high positions in local search results than in general queries. Therefore, we recommend that all young companies first of all direct their efforts to ranking in the region where they serve their clients. To achieve this, consider partnering with the best local SEO services to maximise your visibility and success.
