If you’re even casually familiar with search engine optimization, you probably believe one of two things. You may think SEO is dead as has been reported for several years at least or you believe that SEO is alive and well. While you may have thought SEO’s obituary was true, it wasn’t. The truth is simple – SEO is thriving and it’s constantly changing. And that’s certainly the case for local SEO these days.
The Goal of Local SEO
The goal of local SEO is to improve the search visibility of websites in search engine results pages for businesses that operate in a given community and serve people face-to-face. Local SEO is important for businesses that have physical locations that are open to the public as well as service businesses that operate in a defined geographic area.
Local SEO needs to be designed so that it responds to questions that involve the words “near me.” You should craft your local SEO so that your site will appear in searches involving the location of your organization as well.
Tools for Local SEO Success
Whether it’s a product, platform or service, there are many tools available that can help your local SEO be more successful. The most precious tool you have at your disposal is your time. It’s crucial for you to invest time in mastering SEO in general and local SEO in particular if you want to improve where your website lands in SERPs for local queries.
Meta Titles and Descriptions
If you’re not filling out the meta titles and descriptions for your webpages, one thing is certain – your local SEO will never be as effective as it has the potential to be. Meta titles and descriptions are what’s displayed in search results, which means they’re like miniature ads you can customize to give an indication of what the material that’s presented on your webpages is about.
The key is to make sure your meta titles and descriptions accurately reflect the material on your webpages. You also need to make sure they’re compelling and they appear nicely in SERPs. To see how your meta titles and descriptions will look, you can use SEOmofo or Yoast’s SEO Plugin for sites operating on WordPress.
Online Directories
Google reports that the vast majority of consumers use a search engine to perform local searches. Unfortunately, too many small businesses haven’t even taken the time to claim one local business listing online, let alone several of them. If you haven’t claimed your online business listings yet, you should prioritize doing so. And you should start by claiming your listing on the Google My Business platform.
Yelp, Citysearch and Merchant Circle are a few of the other directories where you should list your business. Conduct a search like “[city name] directory” to identify other directories that are relevant to your business.
No matter where you list your business, it’s vital for you to ensure that your company’s name, address and phone number are consistent across listings. If your listings have inconsistent information, Google may struggle to identify which listing is correct and that can negatively influence where your site ends up in SERPs, if it appears at all.
Our Local SEO Services
DB Marcom specializes in providing local SEO services in many industries. If you want to improve where your site is positioned in SERPs initiated by local searches, our local SEO services are exactly what you need. Contact us to put our services to work for you now.
