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How To Make Your Local SEO Effective

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How To Make Your Local SEO EffectiveBusy shopping street in York, North Yorkshire. Zoom blur effect added.

Local SEO is all about getting your business found online within your local area. But why is it important that a local business should specifically focus on optimising their online presence with local seo?

Well the following statistics from Hubspot show that carrying out effective SEO on your web presence if you are a local business, is certainly worthwhile.

  • 72% Consumers who did a local search visited a store within 5 miles
  • 30% Mobile searches related to a location
  • 28% Searches for something nearby that result in a purchase
  • 50%Percentage of local searches on mobile that result in visit to store within one day
  • 78% Percentage of local searches on mobile that result in offline purchases

Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics

So how can a business improve their local listings online? what are some of the key actions you should take to drive more local traffic to your website?

We have compiled a list of the best actions you can take to improve your local visibility online and ultimately send more targeted visitors to your business.

Keyword Research:
Carry out a full and detailed analysis of your industry and the keyword terms people are using to find businesses like yours locally. This will enable you to not only target the relevant search phrases that people use to find businesses like yours, but it will also save you a massive waste of time from ranking for terms no one uses.

Competitor Analysis:
Do a detailed analysis of those businesses who are ranking well in the local search results and what terms they are ranking for. Take that information and apply it to the work you are going to do for your local rankings within the search results.

Local Citations
A local citation is when your business name, address, and phone number are mentioned online together. This is commonly referred to as your NAP. You find citations within local business directories such as freeindex.co.uk, websites such as Cylex and on social platforms like Facebook.com. Citations help potential clients find your local business and can also have a great effect on local search engine rankings, such as getting your business to appear in Google Maps at the top of the search results.

Social Profiles
Social profile sites such as Facebook,Twitter,Google+,Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn carry a lot of authority and so having a link on them pointing to your website helps boost your own authority within your local niche. However, you may not be aware that there are more than 300 social profile sites on the web that also carry a lot of authority, and so by placing a link from those properties to your website, will have a great effect.

Schema Markup Analysis
Schema Markup was created by Schema.org (often called Schema) and is a semantic vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that can be added  to your website code to improve the way search engines read and represent your web pages within the search results. By creating a local business Schema the search engines will know instantly not only what type of business you are, but what locality you are operating in, thereby increasing your local listings

Schema.org is the result of collaboration between Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! to help you provide the information their search engines need to understand your content and provide the best search results possible at this time.

Google Analytics Setup
If your website doesn’t have Google analytics on it, it is difficult to monitor and analyse the visitors to your website, the pages they are visiting, and the interactions they carry out while on your site. This will help you to improve your target marketing and increase your ROI.

Google My Business 
Google My Business is a free tool for businesses of any size to manage their online presence across Google entities such as search results and the Google Maps. A main requirement is an actual physical business address that can be verified. A Google My Business account  enables you increase brand awareness and provide valuable insight about your business that Google loves.

Bing Places 
Very often overlooked and ignored, Bing Places is the Same as Google My Business but naturally on Bing. The reason why it is overlooked is people argue that no one uses Bing to carry out searches online, but the reality is people are still using Bing as a search engine in the UK, with around 12.26% of searches coming from Bing. It is also worth noting this number increases to 30% in the US. Plus a Bing Local listing actually goes a long way to help you rank locally within Google

On Page Optimisation
Making sure your website is optimised correctly is the very first thing that needs to be done before you do anything else concerning SEO. You need to ensure your key pages have the right title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, alternative tags in images and content for the best results.

Link Building
Links pointing back to your site (links from other sites to yours) is one of the main factors in getting websites ranking high in the search results. Quality links are what matter so you will need to  create, build, and source links from other local sites to yours, that will improve your search rankings.