4 Key Factors That Affect Your Local SEO

It’s become a common occurrence for people in the digital marketing world to combine Local SEO and SEO together as if they are one. Local SEO and SEO can benefit both sides and help your business grow, however, they need to be approached in different ways. 

Local SEO focuses on sending signals to directories and search engines to highlight where a business is located and what you offer. The most common tool used for Local SEO is Google My Business listings, which provide all the local indicators that a business offers. 

Google My Business listings are often overlooked as just a location indicator and nothing else, however, it can help a lot with keywords and location-based searches. If you can pair optimizing and managing your Google My Business listings with on-page website content, you can start to appear for more searches based on location.

Here are four tips you can implement to improve your local SEO and measure how you are doing!

1. Update NAP

NAP stands for ‘Name Address Phone Number’ which is the most common local SEO indicator that a search engine will look for. This information needs to be correct on your Google My Business listing, on your website, as well as the top 50 directories on the internet. 

Inconsistencies in any of these places will confuse search engines on where you are located. For the website, make sure that your address and business information is included on multiple pages. Ideally, you should include your NAP information in your footer or header, as that remains the same on every page.

2. Work on your Google My Business Listing

Many people think that Google My Business is something you create once and leave it for people to use. There are so many factors on Google My Business that can help you rank and show up for searches, specifically local searches like {keyword} {Location}. 

Make sure that you are focusing on getting reviews to your listing on a consistent basis and responding to your reviews. It is common for businesses to respond to negative reviews but leave positive reviews alone. It is important to respond to both positive and negative reviews to show that you care about your customers and it also helps with rankings.

Every business should be adding new photos of their location or products onto the listing to keep it up to date. The more that these aspects are kept up to date the more likely you will be to appear on the search results. You’ll also want to create Google Posts. Google Posts are the equivalent of social media posts but for your Google My Business account. You can create up to 4 different types of posts.

• Event - “Posts that promote an event your business is involved with or supports. Event posts require a title, start/end dates, and time, and may include a photo/video, CTA button, and other information. For example, a bookstore may advertise a local author’s book signing or a book club meeting.”
• Product - “Posts that emphasize a specific product your business sells. Product posts require a title and photo or video. You can also include a CTA button and other information. For example, an electronics store may promote a new phone for sale.”
• What’s New - “Posts that provide general information about your business. You can include a photo/video, link, CTA button, and other information. For example, a restaurant could make a post to promote a new menu item.”
• Offer - “Posts that provide promotional sales or offers from your business. Offer posts require a title and start/end dates and times. A “View offer” CTA button is automatically added to the post. You can also include a photo/video, coupon code, link, and terms and conditions with the post. For example, a pizza parlor may advertise 20 percent off large pizzas for a week.”

The more that you can feed the fire that is your Google My Business listing, the more likely you will show up!

3. Create Proper Office/Location Pages

One of the most important things a business can do for their local rankings is to have solid location pages or office pages on their site. The more information you can provide Google regarding where you are located, the services you offer, and the areas you serve, the better. 

Each office page/location page should have your information on the location, a Google maps API, and around 800-1000 words of content for ranking purposes. Ensure that any service or products you sell are interlinked with internal pages on the site. The idea is that you are not only going to drive traffic but be able to get leads out of the traffic as well. 

4. Local Business Schema

Not only is it important to have location and office pages, but it is also important the backend of the site matches the on-page. Local Business Schema is coding on the site that creates tags and identification for the bots to crawl the site. You can see a bit of a breakdown of some of the code here on how you can help identify parts of your website. Using Schema allows you to control the signals you send out for location information instead of depending on Google to figure it out.

Overall it’s easy to oversee a lot of the aspects above because it seems to be a set it up once and forget about it. Google My Business can be treated like a social media platform and can be consistently updated to help with your business’ local rankings. For the website, make sure you have location pages set up with relevant information and the services you offer. It is easy to maintain and manage for a business and will help your overall SEO strategy. If you’re looking for help with your strategy, contact TechWyse today for a free consultation!