Searching Google to find a top-rated local store nearby is quite a part of our routine now. In fact, research reveals that over 97% of Australian consumers turn to the internet to find businesses in their area, with 86% using Google Maps for store recommendations and their routes.
So, if you are a local business, these numbers are an eye-opener for you to improve your local SEO game. This includes creating strategic content on Google search sites and achieving high online visibility when consumers shop on search engines.
In this blog, we have compiled a list of top local SEO tips 2024, as suggested by the top Local SEO company Melbourne. Incorporating these into your local SEO game plan can improve your local search visibility to a great extent.
Before you get to know the top local SEO tips, you should first understand why local SEO is important.
Why is local SEO important?
It’s simple! It enables you to bring your local customers to your store. With more and more people searching online for local businesses, having a strong online visibility is important. Businesses can achieve this by improving their local SEO strategies, which allow them to ensure their company appears as one of the top results when their consumers look for their products or services online.
And if you can get your local business in front of these online searches, there’s a good chance a large number of these searchers will walk to your door a few minutes later.
6 Powerful and Actionable Local SEO Tips to Dominate Your Local Market:
If you’ve been working on creating a strong local SEO strategy lately, here are the top 6 suggestions by our experts:
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Establish and Keep Up With Your Local Presence Online:
Nothing goes beyond having a Google My Profile (GMB) when it comes to local SEO. And it’s not just about having a GMB profile; keeping it updated is equally important.
GMB is a powerful yet underrated tool that works by connecting businesses with their local people. When searchers go online looking for a service your business can offer, your listing will be active in both search and maps. As such, claiming your GMB profile and keeping it up to date is essential to the success of your local listing. Providing insufficient or incorrect information will decrease the trustworthiness of your business.
When it comes to GMB, Google Posts is a native tool that provides you with an opportunity to publish relevant and fresh content with insightful information about the local area. These focus on promoting engagement and genuine interactions with potential local customers.
You can further enhance your local visibility online by
- Assigning additional categories to your locations.
- Setting relevant local attributes defining your business's operations and characteristics.
- Landing page optimisation to reference many of the attributes specified in the GMB listing.
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Leverage Schema Markup:
It is a set of codes that improves how your web page gets represented in the search results.
Structured data, including schema markup, provides search engines with detailed insights into your business, products, and services. It is responsible for giving them GPS coordinates to your digital doorstep.
Incorporating schema markup to highlight essential local information, such as business hours, location details, and reviews, will ultimately improve your website ranking, which will boost your click-through rates.
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Use Keywords With a Local Intent:
One key factor you can't overlook when working on local SEO is keyword intent. When it comes to choosing the right keywords for local SEO, the crucial question is this: "Who do I want visiting my website?"
Well, marketers should consider three types of SEO intent when planning for their local SEO campaign. Each category will provide details about the searcher, serving as the foundation for the information to be provided.
When it comes to local SEO keywords, these are usually linked with “transactional intent”. These are sometimes referred to as the “buy now” keywords, these form the essence of organic marketing. Transactional intent keywords have an impressive conversion rate, which is crucial in boosting sales and generating fresh leads for your business.
Most SEO strategies revolve around ranking sites for competitive, high-value keywords. However, local SEO also offers a return on investment (ROI). Even though the search volumes may not be sky-high, local searches are packed with intent, bringing valuable traffic to your website.
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Keep Track of Your Reviews:
While there are many ways to assess the performance of your different store locations, assessing reviews is the best way to find the challenges and issues your company may be facing.
The thing is, those issues may vary from location to location. Hence, when it comes to optimising your local visibility, you should identify and address those location-specific issues.
Further, analysing and correlating reviews from different locations could discover issues customers face only in selected locations. However, businesses can still use these reviews as insights to identify factors that detract customers from engaging with their products and improve overall customer satisfaction.
Here’s what you should look for when assessing reviews:
- The ratio of negative to positive reviews across different locations.
- Identifying prevalent issues highlighted by customers in reviews based on specific locations.
- Assessing the severity of these issues to pinpoint areas in need of immediate attention.
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Ensure NAP Consistency:
NAP or Name, Address, and Phone Number, also called local citations, lists information published about specific locations of your business across the web.
The search engine relies on NAP data to validate the accuracy of business or location information, determining the ranking value of the listing.
However, it is important for search engines to ensure that your NAP data is updated and consistent across various social media profiles, directory listings, company websites, and other review sites.
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Create and Optimise Your Content for “Local”:
Marketers should create good local content to solve problems for their target market. This increases the value of your local SEO campaign. Local content could be anything, including informative blogs, videos, posts, guides, infographics, or any type of content that targets a local search term.
Further, content that helps your target audience and provides them with valuable resources and information will increase the overall effectiveness of the content. Make sure to create well-written content geared towards helping the local audience.
Besides, your URLs, headers, title tags and meta descriptions should always be optimised for local search. They should include the details of your city or region and also target the primary search term of the web page it describes precisely.
This way, Google gets a hint about the geographical area your webpage relates to and the content it holds. Accordingly, Google will index your web page in line with this information.
Conclusion:
And the list of local SEO tips doesn’t end here! There’s a lot more you can do to make your brand perform well in local searches, including conducting local link building, setting up local rank tracking, optimising for voice search and mobile, and improving local keyword targeting.
However, implementing the above critical tips as part of your local SEO strategy will help you conquer your local market and solidify your position as a market leader in your community.
