3 Steps to Optimize Your Site for Local Search

3 Steps to Optimize Your Site for Local Search

Local SEO is a search engine optimization of your site, the purpose of which is to move the site’s pages in the TOP-1 in the search results in a specific region, city, district, or even street.

1. Determine who needs local SEO

Any project that has a binding to a specific region. Let it be any business where distance matters, each of these projects has a need to receive customers from its geographic region. We are talking about both small business and regional and national networks with points of sale in several regions. But, you need to consider that if a business is represented in several regions, then in order to achieve better results, optimization should be carried out for each region. Search engines perfectly determine the location of the business, regional offices, etc., and only the right strategy will allow you to get more traffic to the site in the local search results, more leads, and more sales.

2. Must-have elements that will improve your presence and visibility in the local search engine results

  • Make yourself known on Google My Business. This will allow you to rank in Google Maps and collect additional traffic. Signing up for Google My Business is free.
  • Provide accurate data on your Google My Business profile. Detailed GMB data will help users choose your business among competitors.
  • Full location data. You should have a page (or several) of contacts, on which there will be full NAP information – Name, Address, Phone for all your offices. The information should be interactive so that the user can make a call from a smartphone or go to the address in the map application simply by clicking.
  • Work on resource performance. Optimize page loading speed. This will allow the site to take the best position in the search engine results and improve the user experience from interacting with the site, which in turn will increase the conversion rate and lead to more leads.
  • Make your design user friendly. All elements should be located in the most suitable places, the forms should be simple and intuitive. Such actions significantly increase the conversion rate and the average purchase receipt.
  • Choose your business categories carefully. Fill in the information about the main and additional categories of your business as much as possible, in order to show your potential customers the most targeted requests for you.

3. Create useful content for the user

  • Get rid of non-unique content. If you “borrowed” content from another site, Google is more likely to not show the pages of your site with such content in the TOP 10. Rewrite the content, building on your experience and vision of the market situation, or write your own from scratch. And do not forget to indicate the source if you are quoting other web resources on your pages.
  • Get ready for voice search. As the number of mobile devices grows and speech recognition technologies improve, so does the number of people looking for something from their smartphones and tablets using voice commands.

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