To put this another way, local search is BOOMING, and now is the time to hop aboard.

If you’re wondering how to optimize your website to speak to these local customers, wonder no longer.

This post is here to guide you through the process.

5 Must-Have Website Elements for Local SEO

If local customers are everywhere, how do you attract them to your website? Here are seven actionable tips to implement right now:

1. Keep Your NAP Consistent Across All Directories

NAP stands for name, address, phone number, and refers to the “how to find us” information you must always keep consistent. The reason for this is simple: NAP information is instrumental in ensuring customers know how to locate you. If it’s inconsistent or inaccurate, you thwart the best attempts of your customers to track you down.

Unfortunately, about 49% of businesses never update their NAP information online. To make the most of local search, don’t be like these businesses. Instead, keep your NAP information consistent and update it across all major listings whenever anything changes.

2. Collect Positive Reviews

If you want to build credibility for your business, collecting local reviews is one of the best things you can do. The reasons for this are many. The most important, though, is trust.

Right now, 84% of customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends. Because of this, collecting a few high-quality online reviews is one of the best ways to position your company as trustworthy and reliable, and ensure those local customers keep walking through your doors.

If you’re not sure where to start collecting reviews, turn to social sites like Facebook, your Google listing, and relevant platforms like Yelp and Angie’s List.

3. Create Local Content

If you want to dominate local search, you need to focus on dominating local content, as well. Local content serves a few essential purposes when it comes to your site’s SEO. To start, it makes it possible to earn links and get the “link juice” you need to ensure search engines are pointing customers to your site.

Secondly, creating local content positions you as an authority in your industry, and ensures that customer will turn to you for information and knowledge.

Finally, having a large amount of local content in your holster gives you material to share on social media and boosts the likelihood that you’ll land positive press mentions, which, in turn, make it possible to grab the attention of new customers and earn the business you deserve.

4. Optimize for Google My Business

Google is the most dominant search engine in the world, and it wants to focus on sharing content it can support and verify.

While Google uses dozens of different metrics to verify a site’s quality, Google My Business is their primary tool. As it stands now, Google evaluates My Business listings to determine if a business is authentic, learn what it offers, and push listings to customers.

With this in mind, it’s essential to optimize for Google My Business. Here are a few steps to do that:

• Create and verify a Google My Business page
• Use Google Posts within your account
• Gain reviews on your Google My Business page
• Encourage customers to post and respond to reviews online

Google automatically assembles this information for your business based on other data they can find about your business online. This is important because, unless you claim your business listing through GMB, you could be missing out on positive reviews and feedback left about your company across the web.

5. Optimize Web Content

The final step in optimizing your site for local SEO is to turn your attention to your lesser-noticed content, including your URL, title tags, headers, and meta description.

While a great deal of local SEO is just showing up and making it possible for customers to find you, there’s also a very technical aspect to the process. Since Google indexes your pages for later use, it pays to ensure all of your content is optimized accordingly.

With this in mind, check your URL, title tags, site and page headers, and meta descriptions for relevant elements like keywords, geo-targeted information, and more.

Not only will these elements help your content appear in search engines, but it’ll make it possible for highly desirable local customers to find you.

The Case for Local SEO

Today, four out of five customers turn to search engines to find information on local businesses. Because of this, you could miss out on about 80% of your possible customers by simply failing to optimize for local search.

Fortunately, positioning your website for local search is easier today than it’s ever been, and following these five tips is a great way to get a leg-up on the competition.

While SEO is always changing, the importance of local search will only continue to climb, and now is a fantastic time to hop aboard.

Need help with your website? Contact our team today to start your project!

Since then, though, the times have changed.

Even if you miss the days of simple Google ranking, there’s not much small business owners can do but adapt to it. Yes, ranking in Google is more complex today than it’s been in the past, but it’s still far from impossible.

With that in mind, here are our top five tips to get your business to rank at the top of Google’s search engine results page:

5 SEO Tips to Get to the Top of Google

If you’re looking for ways to land a spot at the top of Google, focusing on SEO is your best bet. Here are five professional tips to help your rankings:

1. Optimize Your Content for RankBrain

RankBrain is a machine-learning artificial intelligence system that helps Google sort its search results. Right now, RankBrain mostly helps Google process ambiguous questions that the search engine hasn’t encountered before — an estimated 15 percent (or 450 million) of each day’s search queries.

To take advantage of this intelligent and increasingly critical system, the key is optimizing your content. Specifically, you want to create content for your website that answers unique questions. An FAQ page is a great way to do this, as is a series of blogs with a question-and-answer format.

2. Make the Most of “Near Me” Queries

One of Google’s greatest SEO focuses in recent years has been the idea of “micro-moments.” According to the search engine, micro-moments are “intent-rich moments when a person turns to a device to act on a need — to know, go, do or buy.”

In our complex, modern SEO environment, one of the best ways to get your website on the first page of Google is to optimize for these micro-moments. This means anticipating user needs, being relevant, and making your website informative and easy to access. In other words — be there, be helpful and be rapid about it all.

Optimize your website for mobile, provide plenty of detail-rich and informative content, and tailor everything you do online around helping customers. Need an example? Do your own “near me” search and check out how the business that pops up has likely collected listings and reviews and quality backlinks, as well as optimizing for mobile and offering helpful website content.

3. Optimize Content for Local Searches

While it’s one thing to optimize for “near me” searches, you’ve also got to take advantage of customers who are actually there. The best way to do this is through local search optimization.

In addition to providing the personalized experience users crave, local search optimization can increase your sales and keep customers coming back for more. Here are a few local SEO tips to take advantage of:

• Identify local keywords. You can use a tool such as Google AdWords keyword tool or KWFinder to identify local keywords and compile them.
• Optimize your existing pages. Optimize the pages you already have on your website by including your town or city name in page titles and descriptions, adding a map, and ensuring they offer local content details.
• Get listed in local directories. Drive more local traffic to your business by getting listed in local directories. These directories should include information like your business name, address and phone number — as well as a detailed description in which you tell customers what you do. Don’t forget to include a few high-quality photos and some local keywords for good measure!

4. Implement AMP

AMP stands for “Accelerated Mobile Pages.” Rolled out globally in 2016, AMP offers higher performance and engagement, more rapid results for mobile users, and a greater level of flexibility for page owners. Page speed is set to become a factor in mobile page ranking as of July 2018, so now is a great time to implement AMP if you haven’t already.

Luckily, implementing AMP is easy: Simply install the WordPress plugin if you run your site on that platform. From there, you’ll just need to validate the code and connect it to Google Analytics.

5. Write More Content

No matter how much SEO changes, one thing stays the same. This, of course, is content. The foundation of all good things in the world of SEO, content is a critical ranking factor and one you simply can’t go without. If you’re looking for a way to get your website to rank on the first page of Google, commit to creating more content.

The reasons for this are twofold. First, Google loves fresh content and will rank websites with plenty of it higher than sites that never post. Second, each new post you create gives Google one more page to index, which means more chances for you to rank and more pages for your customers to find. To improve your pages’ chances of ranking, don’t forget to include relevant keywords.

Ranking Made Simple

While ranking at the top of Google can seem like a difficult process, it’s not nearly as challenging as many people make it out to be. By doing simple things, like researching and implementing keywords, optimizing for local search, utilizing AMP and creating more content, you can create a website that ranks on the first page of Google and is every bit as visible as you want it to be.

Does SEO seem too complex for you to undertake alone? Contact our team for professional SEO services designed for small businesses like yours!