How many times have you used your smartphone to find a restaurant while on vacation? You may not know it, but that’s called local SEO. How do you find the tire workshops closest to your home? And when you need to change your appointment with your dentist, where do you look for their phone number?
The appearance of the smartphone has greatly facilitated the work of searching for those businesses that can meet the needs of our day to day. But appearing in these searches requires previous work. Do you run a local business and want to improve your visibility in searches of this type? Follow these tips.
Prior checklist: what should we define in our local seo positioning strategy before starting?
First of all, it is worth reflecting on what will be the pillars of our local seo positioning strategy. Where do we want to position ourselves? Who are we targeting? It is very important not to start crazy because a brand strategy will help us to distinguish ourselves from the rest and focus our value proposition towards those who are really looking for it.
Appearing on local boards and having a solid link building strategy will help us gain relevance and, in the long run, position ourselves better than our competition. In parallel, we must accompany this strategy with a well-developed and useful website for our potential customers. Remember that online and offline strategies must be perfectly aligned, offering a consistent and professional image.
The better the user experience, the better evaluations we will have in all areas. We must be able to create a customer journey that allows us to complete the purchase process easily. The goal is for people looking for our product or service to go from not knowing us to becoming prescribers of our business.
It is very important to note that most searches will be on the street and via mobile . Therefore, we must provide the most relevant information as much as possible, without artifice. Let them know how we can help them, how they can talk to our business and where we are physically.
Work local SEO on your website – some practical examples at your fingertips
Once Google knows us , we must put ‘a lot of love’ in the information we give on our website. In the face of local SEO, we must put a lot of emphasis on the meta titles and meta descriptions of what is our geographical area of work.
If we run a neighborhood store or our services are carried out in Bizkaia, we must indicate this in the meta description or, even, in the meta title of the website. In this way, we will have preference in the order of appearance over those who do not indicate geographic information.
And, if we are going to have an eCommerce , it is important to say it in the meta title of our main page or in the meta description. We may also publish a ‘home delivery services’ page with information on our shipping conditions.
It is essential to consider the most immediate means of contact. If our customers use to call us, we must provide our means of contact in a prominent place on the web.
And, since we are talking about local SEO, it does not hurt to accompany it with a link to our address on Google Maps. The map embedded in the contact page will also help.
And what about voice searches?
Voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant are becoming more comfortable and common, but they have a great disadvantage compared to written searches: on speaker devices only the first search result comes out, so we have to put the batteries.
Having signed up for Google My Business, we have already advanced part of the work regarding voice searches. However, we must also take into account the content of our website: in general, oral language is more colloquial and direct, so we will have to adapt the content to:
- Include common questions in the titles and highlights of our website. This can be solved with a FAQ section.
- Include short, focused sentences to answer these questions to start the texts. Discard everything that sounds like ‘TV shop’ and think of a conversation to inspire you.
- Place the most relevant information at the top of the text, whenever possible. To do this, you can use the inverted pyramid mode to order your texts.
Do you need to know what are the questions your potential customers are asking? With Answer the public you can find ideas to write your texts and respond optimally.
Although your business already appears with a name, address and telephone number on the Internet, you already see that Google has great potential to attract people to your premises. Take advantage of all its possibilities.
