All businesses struggle with the same obstacles; local SEO and competition. As a local business, it’s even more important to stand out from the crowd. If your local area has a lot of well-loved businesses, starting to stand out with your SEO can be hard.
A big challenge for local businesses is the ever-changing list of ranking factors for search engines. If you’re trying to get your website to rank locally, this can be hard. However, if you can manage it, ranking locally is very useful for attracting customers in your area.
1 – Claim your business lightings with local SEO
Over time, a listing for your business is created on Google, and duplicate listings can start to accumulate. To stay in control you need to claim all these listings that are under your business name. Takedown any duplicates and make sure the information on the remaining listing is accurate and up-to-date.
Finding all these listings can be a big effort, but there are online tools to help you, or you can turn to an SEO agency for help. When your listings are accurate, it is easier for customers to find details like your opening hours.
2 – Add location pages to your website
Search engines crawl your site and find matches to deliver as a search result. If you have a landing page for each location for your business, search engines can easily find this listing and will deliver the correct location to the person searching.
3 – Improve NAP consistency
If search engines are going to show your business to people as a search result, you need to have your business names, address, and phone number (NAP) consistent everywhere.
This just doesn’t just mean writing your business name correctly. Include details like LLC or Inc. consistently. Make sure addresses include suite numbers, and are consistent with how words like street, avenue, or road are written. Make sure you do this the same everywhere your NAP details appear.
4 – Update Google My Business
Internet users often rely on business listings for information like opening hours, parking, or contact details, so it is very important that your business is easy for the searcher to find.
Log into your Google My Business account, and make sure that your business name and contact details are correct. Write a brief, clear description of your business, link to your website, and add your opening hours. Use your logo as your avatar and some high-quality images.
5 – Get reviews
Reviews play a part in your local ranking factor and they will also help you to stand out from the competition. Encourage your customers to leave you a review on Google if they have a good experience with you.
Reviews help you to rank better, and also means your results will take up more space on the results page. To take up even more space, make sure your pages have schema markups, sub-pages, and so on.
Social proof is a big benefit to reviews. If searchers see good reviews, they know that your business has been recommended by others.
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[avatar user=”mike” size=”thumbnail” align=”” link=”file”]Mike Gaudreau is the owner of The Wealthy Boomers, a site devoted to helping seniors make money online. Mike resides in Montreal Canada.[/avatar]
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