If you conduct a search for nearby businesses, you’ll see traditional organic search results, but also three entries that stand out near the top. This is known as the “local 3 pack” in SEO, and it has the potential to transform your business.
If you can dominate the local SEO field, you can get into this 3 pack, or even climb to the top of it, ultimately getting more impressions, more visits, and more potential conversions.
But what if you’re practicing local SEO actively, and you’re still not seeing the results you want? What can you do to improve your local SEO strategy?
Local SEO: The Basics
In case you weren’t familiar, local SEO works much like traditional SEO, with a handful of differences. Technical optimization, onsite content development, link building, and other traditional SEO strategies are still essential for improving your brand reputation and boosting your ranking potential.
However, you’ll also need to consider your relevance to a specific geographic location – and specific local SEO strategies like building and auditing citations.
Tips for Improving Your Local SEO Strategy
What steps can you take to improve your local SEO strategy?
- Work with the pros. Consider working with a local SEO agency to expedite your results. While it’s certainly possible to learn and practice local SEO on your own, with no assistance, it’s much easier and more efficient to work with professionals with plenty of experience in this field. Hiring an Anaheim SEO firm, for example, might be the perfect move to climb the rankings and outrank your top Anaheim competitors; agencies have access to plenty of resources, research tools, and technical experts to get you the results you need.
- Do an audit. Regardless of whether you hire an agency or do the work in-house, you should spend some time auditing your current local SEO efforts before fine-tuning your strategy. What are your current local SEO efforts? Where are you ranking for specific geographic keywords and phrases? Who are your top competitors, and what do they seem to be doing differently than you? The better you understand your current position, the better you’ll be able to improve it.
- Clean up your local citations. Local citations are a major factor in local SEO; these are essentially pieces of information about your business that are hosted on external websites, like local directories. The more of these citations you have, and the more consistent they are, the better. Accordingly, one of your first steps is cleaning up your local citations; figure out where your business is cited online and make sure all your information (especially your name, address, and phone number) is accurate. Notify webmasters of any inaccuracies and follow up to make sure they are corrected.
- Set aside time to optimize your Google Business Profile. Creating and modifying a Google Business Profile is free – and in some ways, it’s the key to optimizing your website for local search. Here, you can tell Google everything there is to know about your business, including where it is, its hours of operation, and the core products and services you offer. Fill out every available field and optimize it with keywords aligned with your goals. In addition to helping you rank higher, this can make sure all your organic searchers get access to perfectly accurate information.
- Write more locally relevant content. You already know that developing onsite content is good for SEO. But how much locally specific content are you developing? If you want to be relevant for a specific city, you should at least have a landing page for that city. Preferably, you’ll have many different blog posts featuring content for that city.
- Include geographic keywords in your meta titles and descriptions. In line with this, make sure you include geographic keywords and phrases in all your meta titles and descriptions.
- Get more reviews. The more local reviews you have, and the better those reviews are, the higher your business is going to rank in the local 3 pack. Ask your best customers to leave reviews, provide incentives to people who leave reviews, and thank customers who leave reviews to showcase how engaging your business is. Just make sure you comply with all the terms and conditions of local review companies.
- Become active in your community. Start getting more active in your community; attend local events, get featured in the press, and volunteer for good causes. Any time your business is in the news and associated with a given area, your local relevance will increase.
- Add more citations. Remember when you cleaned up all your local citations? It’s time to add more! Look for new opportunities to reference your business on third-party sites.
- Earn more links. Links are practically essential for any SEO strategy; local SEO is no different. If you want to accelerate your results, it’s important to earn as many links as possible while still prioritizing the quality of those links.
You may not be able to break into the local 3 pack in your first week of effort, or even in your first month. But if you apply these principles consistently, and you maintain quality in both your content development and link building efforts, it should only be a matter of time before you thwart your top competitors and get to the top of the local rankings.
