When you have a business that serves a defined geographical area, you need to pay specific attention to your local SEO. In general, SEO will help put your website pages at the top of search results among competitors. Local SEO focuses on those location based searches where your potential customers are looking for a service or store near them.
On page SEO is one of the easiest types for business owners to accomplish, since it largely involves content and what you see on the front end of your website, as opposed to technical SEO, which relies more on your code. These tips offer some of the essential actions you will want to take to improve your local SEO and increase your search rankings for people in your area seeking the services or products you provide.
On Page Local SEO Techniques
The first step with local SEO is to know which areas you specifically target. If you provide home services and regularly travel to your customers’ homes, know how far you are willing to travel. If your website is the online presence of a brick and mortar store, consider how far customers will drive to reach you.
Once you know your area, helpful ways to make sure you are ranking in that location include:
- Make Location Specific Service Pages
Many companies serve customers in multiple cities in their area. In addition to mentioning these various locations on your main service pages or on a page that specifies the locations you service, you can also make specific location-based service pages. This is important because many times customers will search for businesses in their individual city while that business considers itself as serving a larger metropolitan area.
For instance, a pest control company based in New York serves all five boroughs. Their site has a main service page on pest control that outlines all the different bugs they deal with, but they also have pages for pest control in Manhattan, pest control in the Bronx, pest control in Brooklyn, etc. These pages discuss the same services, but focus on the individual locations.
- Keep your NAP Consistent
NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. As a local business, this information likely shows up on many locations across the web, from your website to your social media pages to any local directories you are listed in. NAP is what many search engines use to link your business where it occurs in multiple places, helping your SEO. You want to make sure that this information is consistent anywhere it appears to avoid confusing search engines and your customers.
- Local Business Schema
Schemas are snippets of code that help clarify to search engines what the purpose of a page is. Local business schema can tell Google that your website is for a business and list your information like your locations served, phone number, opening hours, reviews, and more. Google can use this SEO information when it displays your listing in search results and to help determine what is relevant to local users.
Although this is a bit of code, you will add it to individual pages on your website or into the header or footer rather than your base code, so it is still considered on page SEO. You can find all of the local schema options available at Schema.org.
- Use Location in Your Headers
Incorporate location based keywords into the headings on your pages. For instance, our pest control company in New York wants to target residents of Brooklyn with ant control services. The location page for Brooklyn may include “Ant Control in Brooklyn” as an H2 header. Keywords in headers have significant weight and the headers also provide another place for you to put keywords without having to stuff your content.
- Sound Like You Belong
As you are writing your content for specific locations, consider how the customers who live there think about their area. You may use similar terms, reference specific neighborhoods or landmarks, or refer to specific problems that people in that area may face, such as weather.
As an example, Great Leap Studios is a content marketing company in Sacramento, but many people who live in Sacramento call the city “Sac” for short. Because we expect many customers will search for “content management Sac,” it is worth having both Sacramento and Sac as location keywords on our website.
- Use internal Linking
Once you have the pages for the individual locations you serve, you can boost their relevance to search engines through internal linking. Anywhere else on your site where you mentioned a specific city, you can link to that location page. This increases the chance that someone searching for your service or product in that city will be directed to this page in the search results.
These local SEO techniques are helpful when combined with other local SEO strategies such as writing strong content, using keywords where applicable, and maintaining a Google My Business listing. With a consistent, local SEO marketing strategy, you should be able to see visitor numbers increase in the cities you are targeting.
Great Leap Studios also offers expertise in local SEO. If you are seeking content writing and local SEO services for your area, our in depth knowledge of SEO and high quality content can help you better reach your local customer base at an affordable price. Contact us today to learn more about local SEO for your business.
