Editorial Staff
Google shows some of the search result differently according to the geographical location.
For example, if you search for ‘Restaurant near me’, Google will show the nearest restaurant to your location.
46% of all Google searches are looking for local information.
This means, if you’re not optimizing for local search, you’ll lose huge amount of potential visitors who are ready to shop in your area.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO is one of the Off Page SEO strategy that involves optimizing a site for a local search.
By following the best practice of local SEO, your business can benefit by search performance of the nearby area.
After the possum algorithm update in 2016, Google decided to prioritize the SERP rank based on the local ranking filter.
You might probably remember in chapter 3, that Google has local pack as one of the SERP features.
Optimize for Local SEO
Optimizing for local SEO involves optimizing the on-page and off-page SEO that you have learnt in our previous lesson, but with additional steps:
1. Google My Business
Google released a tool to help your business meet their need: Google My Business.
First, you’ll need to create and verify a Google My Business Page. Once done, you’ll need to encourage your customers to share their reviews online. From there, you’ll need to response the reviews from your authentic account.
But here’s the important part:
When you response to the review, don’t forget to mention and specify the location in the reply.
For example, “We appreciate your feedback on [product/service] in [city, state]. We value your input and look forward to working with you again. Thank you from the [full company name] team.”
If Google finds that your business is authentic and trustworthy, they’ll reward you with a space in SERP.
2. Link Your Google My Business Page With Social Media
You’ve just learnt the social media signal in the previous chapter.
Now, it is time to share your Google My Business Page in your social media account.
Remember, Google considers content shared in social media more important now than ever before.
3. Ensure Your Business Name, Address, and Phone Number are Available on Your Site
If you want to optimize for local SEO, having a clear business address and phone number is crucial.
However, they should be presented on the HTML file instead of image form.
Reason is, Google can’t crawl the data of your address and phone number in the image form.
4. Local Directory Submission
Remember that you’ve learnt about directory submission on the previous chapter?
This is the same practice, but you should prioritize for the local directory such as Express Update instead of the global directory.
Please be note that consistency is the key here.
Always put the same business information in every directory submission.
If you accidentally put a different set of address or number on multiple directory, chance are Google will not show your business at all since they’re not sure which data is the accurate one.
5. Create for a Local Content
If your goal is to optimize locally, then you should create more of local content that specify the location.
This will give Google a signal that your site is focused on a certain area.
For example, instead of creating a content that target generic location such as “How to Buy Second Hand House?”, you should create one like: “How to Buy Second Hand House in Florida” if your business is in Florida.
