Local SEO Checklist: Boost Your Rankings (FREE PDF Download)
- Updated on: 2017-07-06
- Read original article here
The importance of optimizing your business for local search has grown significantly in the last two years. More and more people are using their mobile devices to search for local businesses online.
By optimizing your website for Local SEO, you can help your business stand out in search engine result pages (SERPs) and help attract new customers to your business.
But what is local SEO? And what differentiates local SEO from traditional SEO?
“Local SEO is specialized online marketing that increases visibility for businesses interested in ranking for geographically related keywords. A large component of local SEO is ranking well in the local algorithms. It is also important to rank well in the organic results for local keywords.”
One of the main differences between local SEO and traditional SEO is how you target customers. Location of the searcher plays a key factor in local SEO. Therefore, you must keep geography in mind while optimizing your website for local SEO.
If your website doesn’t show up when people search for your keywords in your location, you could be losing out on a lot of potential customers. Local SEO can fix this problem for you. It takes time and effort to optimize your website for local SEO, but it’s completely worth it.
Here’s a complete local SEO checklist to help you get started with local SEO.
Your website lies at the center of your overall digital presence, as illustrated in local search expert Mike Blumenthal’s graphic below.
Local SEO starts from optimizing your website. Other factors such as customer reviews, citations, and your social media presence become less impactful if your website isn’t optimized for local SEO.
Customer reviews play an important role in local SEO. It’s important to monitor the online reviews for your business. If you operate in a niche that gets few reviews, then you know one or two reviews can ruin your company’s reputation. Reviews and ratings can also reward your website with additional traffic.
High-quality content attracts high-quality backlinks and improves your search rankings. Content and backlinks are two most important ranking factors on google. Therefore, it’s necessary that you have a local content strategy for your website.
Using social media to build local brand awareness is critical if you want to have an advantage over your local competitors. Follow these guidelines below to make sure your social media business pages are optimized for local SEO.
Citations are complete or partial references to your name, address, phone number or website (NAP+W) anywhere on the web. Businesses with greater number of citations tend to rank higher in SERPs than businesses with fewer citations. Local citations are also important to validate that a business is part of a community.
Local SEO has several elements that are different from traditional SEO. Now that you have a local SEO checklist, you can start optimizing your website for local SEO and reach out to new local customers.
You can also get a PDF copy of this local SEO checklist below.
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