Important Local SEO Practices to Consider

Local SEO is just as important as big business SEO.  You need to learn how to connect to your customers, who want to purchase.  Local SEO does bring up a lot of checklists and valuable information, but many enterprise companies won’t target that since they don’t optimize for local searches. But, you should, especially if you want to reach a local market.

The patent for a business only requires you to have four things, a physical address with a legitimate phone number, the H1 matches the name of the business, the URL, and the page has links posting to it from other pages or location and a business name.  The Maps feature also should be utilized, since it forces websites to optimize for the countries, provinces, states, and cities as well.

Since then, the goal of this is to push for local results in websites, and that means that you need to make sure that you have the location specific to the business as well. Otherwise, it’s going to be dropped.  This is something that has recently been used with the Panda and Penguin updates, so remember that.

With enterprises, you want to try to make sure that you claim your business on Google Places, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Groupon, and other location services. But, you want to make sure that you add local links to this as well.  you’ll want to make sure that this manages the local pages, gives you an interface to monitor and respond to various reviews and also pushes the information out to different location sites too.

You should make sure that you establish authoritative pages for the location, the H1 has the location name, the content has the addresses and phone numbers, and you have local schema for the local information in place too.

If you have URLs, you need to make sure that you have the business name as needed. Yext and SweetIQ services will also give you local signals to other locations. You should have everything also optimized for Maps, preferably Google Maps, on pages with the pin to address.  Unique content, whether it be customer reviews, specific location services, links to nearby locations, hours of operation, an event happening, and a location description.

Images are also great because people want to see your business. That way, you’ll be able to show it off, and you should include both text and alt text.  Sub-pages with additional information and internal links to pages as well are also incredibly important.  Ranking for this is super important to have, and if you’re a business who is trying to win in the local market, you need to have a good idea on what it is that you need to do in order to rank in this, so you can do it as needed.

Location is important, and a local business needs this to survive, so always make sure that you’re putting that info in no matter what, since it makes a big difference in the way the business is inevitably ran.