Did you know that almost 60% of all website
visits in 2019 came from mobile devices? This means that people find it easier to use mobile devices when looking for something on the internet instead of using laptops.
If you have a local business in your city, it's paramount to improve your local SEO and make your website mobile-friendly, so you can attract more visitors. To do that, you need to know the local SEO ranking factors and how to improve each of them. These factors are prioritized by search engines when ranking your website.
Keep reading to find out more about them and discover other useful local SEO tips!
What is Local SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It involves a collection of tools and techniques designed to make search engines rank your website higher in result pages. Local SEO deals particularly with promoting a business to local customers. This involves using a few tools and features to make your particular business stand out from the others.
Why Is Local SEO Important?
You might want to skip this type of SEO altogether and focus on regular SEO, but is that a good idea? Local SEO provides clear advantages to businesses that spend time with it. For example, improving your local SEO helps you receive more targeted customers from your area and this means selling more products.
Local SEO also helps with brand awareness and improves your reputation and credibility as a business. Certain local SEO tweaks can help potential clients find your business easier and faster when they look for specific products and services.
Top Local SEO Ranking Factors
To get a better understanding of local SEO, here are some of its most important factors that need your attention.
1. Have A Google My Business Account
This is a tool directly owned and managed by Google. It's useful for local businesses such as coffee shops, restaurants, auto wash shops, and more. It can help you rank higher in Google result pages and even get extra promotion for local searches. To use Google My Business, you need to create an account within this app and verify it. Once you're all set, you should encourage your clients to leave online reviews, mentioning their experience with your business.
Once you have feedback from your clients, make sure that you respond to these reviews mentioning the location of your business. It's important to post genuine replies to the comments left by past clients. Google appreciates when you leave feedback for both positive and negative comments.
2. Have a Good Internal Linking Structure
Internal linking means having a good distribution of links pointing to other pages on your website. This will significantly improve your search engine rankings and make it easier for visitors to navigate your website. For example, each of your blog articles should contain a few links to related articles on your blog. This will eventually make the reader jump from article to article, spending a lot of time on your website.
At the same time, you should also focus on making your website very easy to navigate. Displaying "breadcrumbs"
on each page of your website helps the reader find his/her way back to the initial position easier.
3. Add Location Pages to Your Business
Location pages are very useful if you have more than one physical store within a certain area. This will help Google and other search engines identify your business better. For example, you should create a page for each of your store's location and add important elements such as address details, the phone number of each store, etc
This is a good strategy as it helps potential clients differentiate between the stores that you have and pick the one nearest to their location. However, make sure that you don't create duplicate content for your location pages as this can make Google penalize your website.
4. Make Sure That Your Website Is Mobile Friendly
One of the best ways to rank higher in search engine result pages is to make your website mobile-friendly. This involves ensuring that the website is displayed correctly on phones with different display resolutions as well as different operating systems. The phone user should have quick access to a navigation bar, a home button, and a "Contact Us" button. These are some of the most important elements that need to be displayed on smartphones.
Making a website mobile-friendly is not the easiest thing in the world, especially if you have a rather complex and sophisticated website. In this case, maybe it's a good idea to work with a website developer who can offer excellent website design services. A professional can code your website so that it displays well on phone screens of all sizes., reducing the risk of losing customers.
5. Make Sure That Your NAP Is Consistent
NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. These are some of the most important elements that need to be associated with your business and website. The best place where you should display your NAP is on the header or footer of your web pages. As a result, a potential client can contact you right away if he/she wants to order something or make a reservation.
Chances are that you'll be placing your contact details on multiple applications similar to Google My Business
such as Yelp, Bing Places, etc. Make sure that your NAP is consistent across all these accounts to rank higher in search engine result pages. If you change your phone number or address, update the NAPs on all platforms as soon as possible.
Are You Ready to Improve Your Local SEO Rankings?
These are some of the most important local SEO ranking factors that you need to take into account. Although improving local SEO might seem intimidating in the beginning, all these steps are logical and they gradually improve your rankings in result pages.
If you want to skip the work and just reap the benefits of having good local SEO for your business, make sure that you contact us today! Our digital marketing agency specializes in local SEO and we can help your company stay ahead of the competition for an affordable price.
