How to Improve Your Local SEO

Creating a good local SEO strategy is one of the best ways to ensure that your business is noticed by consumers and gets the leads you need to stay in business. Having a solid online presence is also important if you want to keep customers coming back to your business. This includes ensuring that you have a website that is responsive to different devices, as well as social media accounts that are easily accessible to customers.

Online reviews set your company apart from other local businesses

Getting reviews from customers can be a smart way to set your company apart from the competition. Positive online reviews make your business more attractive to new and existing customers. They can also help your business improve its search engine ranking.

Online reviews can be a powerful tool to help you improve your customer service and sales. A good review can encourage consumers to spend more. It can also catapult your business to the top of local search results. A negative online review can drive potential customers away. It can also damage your business reputation.

A one star increase in a restaurant review can boost revenue by up to 5 to 9 percent. For a $1 million per year business, this can translate into up to $50,000 to 90,000 in additional revenues.

Getting a positive online review can be as simple as creating a third party review site and encouraging customers to leave reviews. Some of the most effective review platforms include Facebook and Yelp.

Structured data mark-up

Including structured data mark-up on your website can be beneficial to your local SEO efforts. It provides Google with all of the information it needs to understand your page. The information can be used to create rich snippets and enhance search results.

A video structured data snippet can provide a lot of valuable real estate in the SERPs. For example, you can use a video snippet to highlight upcoming events, answer complex questions, or highlight a product.

You can also use a snippet to add important company information to your social media profiles. It’s also a great way to let your customers know that you’re at the forefront of your industry.

When you’re creating structured data markup, it’s important to follow the guidelines set by Google. This will increase the chances that you’ll appear in the knowledge graph panel. Similarly, it’ll improve the way Google’s bots read your keywords.

Keep your NAP citations up-to-date

Keeping your NAP citations up-to-date is a crucial aspect of local SEO. Incorrect information can negatively affect your search visibility and rank. It can also frustrate customers and create a bad customer experience.

Unlike informal citations, official directory listings are vetted by Google. They will not consider websites that do not meet their criteria to be legitimate. Having a solid citation is one of the best ways to establish trust.

A citation is a mention of your business’s name, address, and phone number on another website or social media. These mentions help local consumers find you. These citations appear on “near me” searches.

If you own a business, it is critical that you maintain accurate NAP data. These listings are used by search engines to determine which sites to display in localized results. If you have multiple locations, you may need to use different phone numbers for each.

Ideally, your company’s website contact information should be easy to read and understand by humans, and easy to crawl by search engines. This data should be consistent across your website and other sites, and should include spelling and formatting.

Google Algorithm

Several years ago, Google rolled out an algorithm change that affected local search results. This update, known as the Possum update, appeared to affect 64% of Google’s local pack. Its impact was largely unreported, though, and many local SEO experts believed that the update was intended to diversify Google’s local search results.

Google’s local search algorithm considers a number of factors to determine a business’ ranking. These factors include relevance, prominence, and proximity. It also takes into account how well a website is structured, as well as whether or not the site has duplicate links and external domains.

Another factor is social signals, which are generated by users on social media sites. This helps Google to figure out the quality of a website’s links.

Google’s algorithms also take into consideration the number of searches in the area. For example, if Susan searches for “deep dish pizza downtown Chicago,” she will see a list of results in Chicago, as opposed to one for a restaurant in Los Angeles.