Increasingly, users rely on searches they perform over the Internet, either from their cell phones or computers, to find Information about products or services What do you need. The local search for terms like “restaurants near me” or “lawyers near me” has increased significantly. Hence, it is important that companies know how to customize their SEO strategies and get visible on search results pages.
Local SEO makes it possible to position a company website in such a way that it appears at the top of the search results in the desired area.
Local SEO is a strategic process, the aim of which is to focus SEO optimization efforts for stationary businesses, i.e. regional companies who have a local, physical business or offer their services locally.
The main benefits of a good local SEO strategy include increasing organic traffic on the company’s website or Google My Business page, reducing advertising costs in Google Ads, and increasing the number of reviews on the company page (which also leads to a higher visibility both on Google Maps and in the SERPs), more links and an improvement in the user experience, which Google attaches great importance to.
Build a local SEO strategy
-Services and products: First of all, it is important to be clear about how the company will position itself. Do you focus on selling a product or service? The goal is to have a very clear list of the products or services on offer. In this way, it can be determined which keywords are best suited to position the company. Next, a search for these keywords is done using one of the many tools on the internet, but the results are geographically focused (geotargeting).
-Existing efforts: Any existing activity or effort should be reviewed before proceeding. With this in mind, the company’s website (if any) as well as the GMB profile and all social media profiles should be checked. What to look for Ideally, if you have an XML sitemap and Robots.txt configured, if there is duplicate content, how the website was indexed, then focus on the most important SEO positioning factors like website speed, missing titles or meta descriptions, etc.
-Geo-specific keywords: When looking for keywords, it is important to focus on the geographic area in which the services are being offered. For example, a plumber providing services in the Cuenca area should focus their efforts on positioning themselves for searches such as “plumber in Cuenca” or “plumber in the Cuenca area” or perhaps “plumber in the capital city of Cuenca” .
-Competitive Keywords: Keywords not only need to position their own pages, they need to be positioned above the pages of competitors. But you have to know what these terms are, there are many tools on the Internet that not only show you which keywords you are using, but also where your links come from and further information.
-SEO-On-Page: After analyzing the work so far and looking for the keywords, they need to be entered both on the website and in Google My Business. This information is to be used to optimize the title, meta descriptions and images of the website as well as to use it in the description of GMB as well as in the category and in the services.
-Local Pages: Once the existing content is optimized, new content must be created that is geared towards attracting local traffic. For this purpose, informative content that attracts visits from Google must be offered via the keywords found in the search. To do this, H1 and H2 must be optimized, as well as the meta descriptions and images.
-Optimize the Google My Business profile: In the next step, the information found is used to optimize the Google My Business profile.
-Other directories: In addition to Google My Business, there are other business directories such as Bing Places, Yelp and Yellow Pages. It is important to be present in all of them because even if it doesn’t seem like it, there is life beyond Google and many users will access these services to do their searches.
-Content strategy: Next, you need to propose a content strategy, with that in mind it is possible to use any channel. If you don’t have a website, you can do so through social media. It’s also not a bad ideal to compile a list of local publications, send out a press release, or do some sort of collaboration.
– Create comments and ratings: Finally, for local SEO, it is very important that users and customers leave positive reviews on Google My Business as these comments allow the company to stand out and provide visibility. However, you shouldn’t stick to Google My Business either, but have to search for positive reviews on Facebook, Yelp or any other platform.
