Local search is very powerful for a small business. In fact, four out of five consumers use search to find local information, which means if your business isn’t being optimized for local search, you could be missing out on 80% of your potential customers. Ultimately, local SEO is critical if you want your business to stay relevant in the digital space.

Local SEO helps businesses promote their products and services to local prospects and customers. To gather information for local search, search engines rely on signals such as local content, social profile pages, inks, and citations to provide the most relevant local results to the user.

Best Local SEO Tactics

To thrive in local search, you need to do at least three things: optimize your Google My Business account, improve your on-page SEO by updating your website, and excel on the World Wide Web. While it might sound a bit overwhelming, succeeding in all three is possible with patience and perseverance.

Google My Business

Google My Business has become very important to local search. Since Google feels most comfortable sharing content it can support, trust, and verify, Google My Business is their tool to help your business meet their needs. If Google can verify your business as authentic and trustworthy, it could potentially reward your business with a coveted sidebar space in the Google local search. To ensure you are optimized for Google My Business, you will want to create and verify a Google My Business page, use Google Posts within your account, encourage your customers to share reviews online, and respond to reviews while also specifying your location.

Website Updates

Now that you know how to optimize your local business through Google My Business, now we will take a look at five simple website updates to improve your local SEO.

1. Improve Internal Linking Structure
2. Optimize URL, Title Tags, Headers, Meta Descriptions, and Content
3. Add Location Pages to Your Website
4. Create Local Content
5. Ensure Your Website is Mobile Friendly

Engaging With The World Wide Web

So far you have learned how to optimize your business for Google My Business and how to update your website for an internal SEO boost. Now, we will take a closer look at NAP consistency, directories, and inbound links to take your business one step closer to that number one spot on local search.  

1) Name, Address, and Phone Consistency

When it comes to having your name, address, and phone on the world wide web, consistency is key. Discrepancies like misspellings, abbreviations, lack of suite number, or wrong phone number can be problematic. Not only will customers have a harder time find or reaching out to your business when necessary, Google will also have a problem with incorrect information. If Google can not determine which information about your business is correct, it may not show your business in search results at all.

2)Optimize Online Directories and Citations

Within the United States, four map data aggregators provide a large amount of the map data for Apple, Yelp, Bing, Google+ Local, Trip Advisor, and more. Just like NAP, consistency is also key. Again, misspellings, abbreviations, lack of suite number, or wrong phone number can be problematic for not only your clients but also Google. Additionally, if you do spot an incorrect listing, be sure you can remove any duplicate listings.

3) Get Inbound Links With Relevance and Authority

Inbound links are a powerful opportunity to boost your local SEO-- every inbound link can also raise your domain authority. A few ways to get inbound links include sponsorships or partnerships, guest blog posting, and scholarships. We hope we have given you some more information on local SEO and how to optimize it to give your business the attention, traffic, and clients it deserves. For more information on local SEO and what we can do for you, head on over to Red Shark Digital!