Local SEO has become more important than ever because of the COVID-19 pandemic situation. When the whole world is under lockdown, localized digital advertisement is the only way for businesses to survive. And so, knowing the importance of local SEO for your business, if you’re looking for the best local SEO provider around, look no further and dive in because this is your lucky day.
A recent study on the state of local SEO in 2020 states that 51% of businesses will continue investing in marketing and continue to use local SEO to keep their business up and running. And so, let’s take a look at some super local SEO tips that will instantly improve your local SEO rank.
Ways To Improve Your Local SEO Rank In 2021
Here are 12 actionable tips on instantly improving your local SEO game:
1. Create A Mobile-Friendly Design
In 2021, every person expects your business website to be equally accessible and visually attractive across all devices. It is called ‘responsive website design.’ It is a common belief that a mobile-first and mobile-friendly website is one of the prime ranking factors for local SEO.
2. Create and Setup Your Google My Business Account
Your business presence and visibility on Google is your top priority, mainly when 85% of people in the world use Google. A Google My Business (GMB) increases the online presence, establishes credibility, and increases turnover by creating new leads and opportunities simply because it exposes and allows people to connect with your business from around the world.
3. Perform Local Keyword Research and Optimize Your Contents Accordingly
Look over all supposed keywords that you think are relevant to your business and optimize the existing contents in your website around them. And to ease your work and keep track of your keyword rankings, subscribe to a premium keyword research tool.
4. Identify and Track the Positions of Your Targeted Keyword on SERP
Tools like Moz, SEMRush, SurferSEO are great tools for monitoring and organizing your content. It also allows you to understand which keywords can bring more value to your business and offer more value to the customers at the same time. And so, tracking the keyword progression on a paid tools makes it easier to focus and optimize your content.
Besides, you can also focus on other relevant keywords around your main keywords to take your business on the top of every business in your domain. After all, the goal is to be in the first position on page 1.
5. Local Link Building and Engaging with the Community
Local link building goes hand in hand with community engagement. As a small business owner, your goal should be to engage with all other people and businesses in your area and create an interactive community around it. This is how it works.
And here’s how you do it – communicate with other local businesses and ask them to link to your website, which is the fastest way to gather quality backlinks and make Google notice your business’s digital presence.
6. Establish Your Credentials on Other Online Business Platforms
If you’ve done your part of the gathering, updating, and validating information on GMB, then you’ve done your work for 85% of the people. Now, it’s time to target the rest 15% and move on to establish your business credentials on other platforms such as – Yelp, TripAdvisor, HubSpot, etc.
7. Dominate Your Social Media Presence
A solid social media presence these days goes a long way to creating a successful business. So the idea is to make your content and promote it across all social media like – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Linked In, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and any other media to maintain consistency.
Besides, choose which brands are most popular among the people in your area and also the one which drives more engagement with the customers.
8. Create An Interactive Experience with Your Customers
Making an active online presence isn’t an easy job. So, timely interacting with your customers and catering to their needs is the first goal of creating a top-notch customer experience. Google emphasizes good customer engagement and prefers businesses that are active on social media platforms.
Consistency is key to success here. So, make sure to post on social media regularly and try to interact with your social media followers by throwing questions, giving feedback, hosting events, giveaways, etc. Use a Social Media Toolkit to plan your activities.
9. Actively Manage All Reviews and Ratings
An active and customer-centric business should encourage its customers to leave positive feedback. Positive feedback goes a long way to boost the impression of your business both online and offline (customers). Therefore, it’s essential to reply to the feedback and know how to use them to build an image for your brand.
10. Use Locally Targeted Advertisements
Locally targeted ads are one of the most effective ways to reach the audience you are looking for. Every local business hopes to dominate its niche both digitally and physically. And so, an effective digital marketing strategy is to spend a considerable amount on local advertising and specifically focused on the right audience within confined geolocation.
Besides, mark your presence on Google Maps to allow people to see and interact with your business. Using Google Maps for local SEO is highly recommended. Plus, it’s free!
11. Optimize All Your Contents for Voice Search
Voice search is the name of the new game in SEO. With the increase of voice-assisted technologies like – Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri, and other personal assistants, people are shifting towards voice-based keyword search rather than typing to search for something.
Focusing on Google Assistant is the next step of the local SEO as it is yet to be popular. Using structured data, using keyword research tools, discovering natural long-tail keywords is the way to dominate this digital marketing niche.
12. Regularly Monitor Your Website’s Health
A healthy website is of utmost importance to Google. Loads fast has good engagement, lightweight, removing errors, time updates – all these make a healthy website.
Takeaways
In all honesty, these 12 tips for local SEO are more than enough to create and scale a successful business online. And so, make sure to use your time and resources well enough to ensure that all is well spent to tackle your business at all times – including pandemics.