The term local SEO is unknown to many small business owners but for some businesses this is all they need to succeed online. Our comprehensive local SEO checklist will help you optimize your website for local search.
If you don’t want to read the whole article, go straight to the local SEO Checklist.
Local SEO is the process of optimizing your website so that it appears in the first positions of Google, Bing and Yahoo for searches that are related to your area / city / country. Let me give you a couple of examples to understand this better.
Example 1: lawyers in Nevada
When a user types in the location in the search query then the intent is clear and Google will try to satisfy the user by returning in the top results businesses (in this case law firms) that are registered to operate in the state of Nevada. How does Google know where a company is operating? This is something we will see in a while…
Example 2: florists in London
When you search google.co.uk for the term florists in London you will get a list of flower shops that have a live business in the general area of London.
Example 3: Italian restaurants in New York City
On your next trip to New York open Google and type Italian restaurants in New York City and I am sure that the returned results will help you choose a nice restaurant to enjoy a memorable pasta or Pizza. Why? Because as we will see below you have to prove that your business deserves one of the top positions in their search results and they are very careful of which businesses to showcase.
The list could go on and on but the general idea about local SEO is that the user wants to find an address or a telephone number so as to take a visit or call to satisfy a requirement.
Someone may say that local SEO is similar to long tail SEO but with the location added in the query string and this is correct. Actually we can say that people looking for local businesses are the most targeted searches you can find online.
From the examples above it is clear that every business that has an address and operates in a certain area needs local SEO. Do you own a restaurant, a barber shop, a law firm? Are you a doctor, mechanic or a retailer? You need to have a website that is optimized for local SEO.
People use the Internet to search for a businesses before they actually visit and if they don’t find you it’s obvious that you are losing customers and opportunities and someone else will take advantage of them.
Increase your chances of appearing high in the SERPS – As you can see from the images above, businesses that are chosen to appear in Google search results (including Google Places for Business listing) are more likely to receive more visits than websites that don’t appear in the recommendations.
More conversions – There is a high rate of conversion since visitors coming to the website from local search are highly targeted.
Brand Visibility and awareness – More people searching for businesses in your area will know about your existence and this will make your brand more recognizable and also raise awareness’s about your business.
High return on investment – An optimized website for local search can generate more value to a business since all they want is to get customers searching the web for businesses in their area. This generates a high return on the investment made and potential higher growth than companies who don’t take advantage of this.
Local SEO is for searches in a specific geo location while SEO practices are applicable for global wide searches. It should be noted that all SEO advice either about on-page or off-page SEO are applicable for local as well. The difference is that for local you also need to make sure that you provide more signals to Google, as we will see in the checklist below.
Also, if you are searching from mobile or if you allowed Google to track your location when searching from Desktop, you don’t have to type a location in your search string because Google already knows where you are located.
No and the reason is that if you try to target users in a particular area, it will be more difficult to rank for keywords that are related to global search. Take for example my case with reliablesoft.net. We have clients from all over the World and since we want to rank for more general terms we do not give any local signals to search engines, other than those we need to give to our users for business clarity and trust.
We have talked about the importance and benefits of local SEO to businesses but we have not yet come to the most important part of this post i.e. what you have to do in order to optimize your website for local search. The local SEO checklist below has all the information you need to get started.
1. Optimize your logo – One of the first things that search engines encounter when crawling your website is the logo image and this is also a good place to start your local SEO optimization. There is a detail post about logo optimization by Chris Silver Smith on searchengineland but the most important points are outlined below:
Make sure that your image filename is descriptive. Instead of using logo.png better use a more meaningful description like ‘Mayers-dental-surgeons-logo.png’ALT text is important for all images but more important for the logo. You can use the ALT text to give more details about the image and in this case the location of your business. For example you can use ‘Mayers Dental Surgeons, Florida’ as the ALT text. As already explained in my SEO Tips article, you can use keywords in the ALT text but don’t overdo it.Add the location in the title tag of the link. For example
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