While Local SEO efforts may begin with your Google My Business listing, they certainly do not end there. There are a number of things, in addition to creating a Google listing, that a business can do to increase their Local SEO presence.
The Local SEO Strategy list
- Creating profiles and pages on other directory sites including Apple, Bing, Yelp, Yell.com, and more. Making sure the profiles are completed with information such as which categories your business is in will help with Local SEO results.
- Creating business profiles on social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook and providing information about your business on them.
- Interlinking profiles where this is possible. For instance, several directory and social sites have fields for your Facebook and Twitter profiles and if you fill them in then you are interlinking.
- Posting relevant content on these business profiles to educate users and search engines and improve engagement with potential customers. In particular, Google Posts can be used and linked together to encourage search engines to crawl all of your posts. Without fresh content, your Local SEO results are unlikely to improve.
- Performing Keyword research to hone in on the keywords that are yielding the best results, and recognising those that are not. Don't forget location keywords which help you to rank higher in your locality.
- Creating local tags for all images, headings, and text throughout the company’s website, blog and directory listings. Tags contain metadata which search engines can read but is not displayed to the human eye.
- Obtaining relevant backlinks and trying to ensure, as much as possible, that the anchor text for those backlinks is relevant. These days it is the quality of the backlinks rather than the quantity which is important.
- Press Releases are an excellent source of high authority backlinks, but you need to use the right PR distribution service.
- Making sure that people searching for your business with a smartphone have a good experience. This is likely to be the majority of local searches these days.
- Optimising for voice search (e.g. Apple’s Siri).
- Optimising URL structures.
- Implementing Schema and its relevant mark-ups. This is another opportunity for interlinking by using the "SameAs" function.
- Obtaining quality Citations and mentions. Citations include profiles on the directory and social sites mentioned above but go wider than that.
- Obtaining positive reviews and responding to reviews when you get them. This shows social engagement which is increasingly important for Local SEO.
- Creating social media profiles across all major social networks, as well as niche social networks.
The list of things that can be done to improve a business’s Local SEO is extensive, and as Google continues to change and add to its algorithms, the list of tasks is only going to increase. It is for this reason that many businesses choose to leave the task of SEO, including Local SEO, to professionals that can manage the job for them.
About MyLocal
We work with your website designer to improve your ability to be found in Google and other search engines. And to look good wherever you may appear online. We specialise in local SEO and most of our work is off-site. But there still needs to be some on-site work undertaken by your webmaster to complement what we do. If you would be interested in finding out more, please use the Contact Form on our website.
What is the most important thing businesses can do to improve their Local SEO efforts?