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Post Published on September 15, 2022
Last Updated on by Sharat Nair
Are you looking for a pizza shop? As you type the phrase ‘pizza shop’ into Google, it will provide a large number of search results. Amongst these, you will find three of the local pizza shops (small businesses) occupying positions in the top 5 organic results for this particular phrase.
Search engines pay attention to the geographical location of the searchers. Now the local pizza shop owner is smart enough to implement a few crucial strategies to ensure maximum visibility of his shop in your area. If his business is not optimized for local search, he misses out on potential customers ready to eat pizza in his area.
So, take some time to read this comprehensive guide on optimizing your website for local search.
What is local SEO?
Local SEO is about optimizing your local business’s web presence to maximize its visibility in local organic search engine results. It is significant for businesses with brick-motor locations. Relevance, proximity, and prominence are the three crucial pillars of local search. Search engines like Google look for signals such as business profile pages, citations, or local content to provide the most relevant local results to the searcher.
Let us delve deeper into how you can improve your local SEO to improve your local business.
Create a Google business profile
Be 100% sure you have the correct name, address, phone number, business hours, and other up-to-date data. It is a perfect tool to help your business meet Google’s requirements. You can also add or update contact information, opening and closing hours, and add images from Google Maps and Google search.
To enhance the experience of the potential customers, they must be given accurate and up-to-date information to quickly find your business.
Keep NAP updated
NAP stands for the name, address, and phone number (with area code) of a business. Do not include NAP within an image. It should be in the form of HTML text. Images cannot be crawled by search engines. Include NAP either in the header or footer of the site or on the ‘CONTACT US page.
Submit your website to high-quality local directories
Reputed local directories will significantly boost your site’s position in search results. Google indexes the directory entries, and the high-quality directory will return the directory entry in a high position in search. It will increase the visibility of your business via search results from another site.
Integrate more visual elements
Integration of more visual elements with its text-based search results provides local searchers with a rich experience. For instance, infographics will entice searchers to use broad queries to dig deeper into the topic. Similarly, intuitive highlights help pull details like calorie counts, ingredient lists, and nutritional information from a page without the need to click through a website.
Adjust your internal linking structure
It is essential to improve your internal linking structure as it supports website navigation, helps with information architecture and website hierarchy, and distributes page authority and ranking power among pages.
Add location to your website
Creating a location page is imperative if you have more than one brick-and-mortar location. The location page should provide the searchers with your name, address, contact number, store description, store hours, promotions and deals, testimonials from happy customers, and other important information.
Develop a responsive website
Offer a seamless experience to the searchers who use their smartphones to search for something nearby. People usually use mobile to read reviews, find directions to their location and search for contact information. The most common search is ‘near me when it comes to local searches on mobile. Mobile searchers are more likely to contact a local business if they have a mobile-friendly site.
Create local content
Sites featuring relevant, genuine, and in-depth informative content that people are interested in tend to perform well in search results. Using the right keyword is essential. Also, if the content is particularly a good resource, other site owners will create backlinks to them. It will generate a higher placement of your site in search results. So a comprehensive blog post on the pizza of your shop will increase the chances of pizza lovers in your area arriving at your blog post and learning about your service.
Local SEO tools
Now that you know how to optimize your site for local SEO, why don’t you explore some essential local SEO tools to improve ranking and visibility?
Here are some of the imperative SEO tools you can leverage for your site
