5 Best-Kept Secrets of Local SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) has seen a lot of changes in the last couple of years. For online marketers and business owners, SEO is absolutely essential for the continued growth of your business whether you own a brick and mortar store or your business is strictly online. 

What's Local SEO and Why is it Vital to Local Businesses?
For local businesses, onHaving reviews about products that a business sells will give customers an insight into how to tell if they want the product. According to Podium, consumers who used to rely on word-of-mouth recommendations now rely on online reviews. In fact, over 80% of consumers trust reviews as much as they trust recommendations from family and friends.line visibility is more important than you think. With more and more people using their mobile phones to find products and services near them, if you don't ensure that they can find your business online easily, you risk getting left behind. 

Local SEO offers an effective way to market yourself online. It helps local businesses promote their products and services to local customers exactly when they're seeking them. While local SEO involves boosting your website's rank on the search engines, it also involves using listings like Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, Yelp, and others. It also helps you understand the value of localized website content, online reviews, and more. 

The Five Best-Kept Secrets of Local SEO
The subject of local SEO is an enormous topic with many different features and aspects. We've selected five of the most crucial local SEO factors that will improve the visibility of your business online and your search engine ranking. Knowing the most important local SEO factors to focus on will give your business an advantage over your competition. 

1. Citations
Citations are online listings or references to your business that will include the name, address, and phone number (NAP). Listings in business directories or review sites for your industry are both examples of citations sources. 

Consistency is crucial when dealing with citations. Take advantage of high-profile directories by listing your business with them. Don't waste your time on smaller or newer ones until they have a good rank and some authority. Just make certain that your NAP follows an identical format for each and every listing. If there are changes, make sure you have a list of each citation so that you can keep all of them updated and matching. 

2. Google My Business
Creating a Google My Business (GMB) listing is very important. Once you've created your listing, make sure your profile is optimized: 

• Make sure your business categorization is correct.
• Include relevant keywords in your GMB business title.
• Ensure the link to your website is correct.
• Ensure the business hours listed are correct.
• Ensure your business address is correct for location purposes.
• Include your business logo.
• Include high-quality images.

3. Linking
When we refer to linking, we mean the inbound links to your business website and the value assigned to each. Links to your business website are good, but not all links are equal. The following factors are taken into consideration by search engines when assigning links value:

• Authority: The higher the quality of the site, the more a link to your site from it means. Links from high-quality sites with authority are desirable.
• Quantity: The only thing better than a link from a top-quality website with authority is many links from such sites.
• Anchor text: Anchor text refers to the text highlighted in the link that the user clicks on. Search engines view the text here as an indicator of subject matter. Just don't over-optimize it.

4. Reviews
Reviews matter. Online reviews are extremely important when it comes to local SEO. For one thing, they offer valuable feedback from customers that can be used to make improvements by wise business owners. On occasion, businesses can use reviews to reach out to unhappy customers and turn them into happy customers. 

Some of the major online review platforms you'll want to monitor: 

• Better Business Bureau (BBB)
• Facebook
• Foursquare
• Google My Business
• Yellow Pages
• Yelp

If you're just getting started and don't have any reviews yet, don’t worry. You can always ask customers to submit reviews on the platform of their choice at any time. 

5. On-Page SEO
As they are in traditional SEO, on-page SEO techniques are vital in local SEO too. Your business website's content should provide value to your local audience and prospective clients. Ensure your content includes targeted keywords and long-tail keywords, but again, don't overdo it. The following page elements should be properly optimized to include relevant keywords. 

• Page URL
• Page title
• Meta description
• Heading tags
• Alt images tags
• NAP

Your page should be easy to read and easy to crawl for the search engines. Furthermore, your NAP should be displayed on each page of your website in either the header or footer. 

Takeaway
The five local SEO secrets above should give you a great place to get started on building or revamping your business's online marketing efforts. Remember to be patient because the benefits of SEO when done well take time. Finally, measure your results carefully so that you'll know which of your efforts are really paying off and which you shouldn't waste any more resources on.