Optimizing Your Local SEO Strategies
Local SEO is essential for smaller businesses that operate on a regional, even municipal, as opposed to a national, level. While national SEO focuses more on ranking in searches across the entire country, local SEO prioritizes appearing on SERPs for a specific location.
This strategy relies on marketing your brand, products, and services to local leads and customers, which is a little harder than it looks with all the competitors vying for those coveted local pack rankings.
Meta Title Tags Are Key
Since this often is what will be the headline in your search result. Never have “home” or — while a bit better — “John’s Tree Service.” You need specifics for local search, so the 64 characters you can use in your meta title tags should be something along the lines of 3 primary keywords, then your city, 2 more keywords, and then another city. So, taking the Tree Service company above, the title meta tag could be: “Reliable affordable tree service Portland | tree removal | Hillsboro.”
Proper URL Structure
It used to be that your URL didn’t matter; now it does. So try to get keywords in your URL. Don’t go getting a new URL, because the search engine spiders actually like older sites better than new sites. But if you’re starting fresh, aim to use keywords in your new site’s URL.
Content
As for your content, aim for this keyword formula: place your keywords in your headline and within the first 150 words of the content. Keep the content flowing naturally and don’t try to stuff as many keywords as possible in your copy. This will send negative signals to Google that your site is overly-optimized. Be sure to use your location in a keyword. Aim to have at least one hyperlink on each page link to another internal page of your site.
Particularly important for local search is making sure you have your address and phone number on each and every page, including your home page. Aim for this address and phone number to be the same as on any other websites or blogs you may have, as well as in online directories such as YellowPages.com, Google Place, Yahoo!, etc.
Work to get listed on all the directories you can find, from the extremely local niched (your chamber of commerce and your local newspaper’s directories), to Web directories.
Customer Feedback
Ask your happy, and even unhappy, customers and supporters to submit reviews to YellowPages.com, SuperPages.com, Yahoo.com, etc. If they’re willing, but time is scarce, offer to write the review for them, let them read it and make any changes they wish, and then submit it yourself with their names.
Let us here at Sharp Tack Media get your site optimized for local search. The process is time-consuming and the learning curve is long. Do you really have time to do all that needs to be done to optimize your site for local search? Probably not. But local SEO is what we live and breathe. Contact Sharp Tack Media today!
