Leverage local SEO for prominence in your locality

SEO by itself is a vast topic and for businesses that have a physical presence in any particular area, nothing can boost its growth like local SEO services. Enjoy business prominence like never before by applying local business SEO techniques.

While most businesses employ SEO techniques to rank on Search Engine Results Page many of them overlook the importance of local business SEO. Any business that caters to clients locally should consider local SEO services to improve visibility in their locality. Businesses such as retail outlets, restaurants, dentists, doctors or lawyers could easily improve their presence online if they optimize for local searches fetching them better returns. Before you hire a local-SEO company to help your business attain better visibility in your locality, here are a few tools and basics you can try out on your own.

Begin by creating and claiming a local profile on Google and other platforms. This local listing will be shown for local search results. Once you have created a profile, you can work on citations. Citations are where the name, address and phone number for your company appears online the same page. It is a strong citation, if the reference is made in the same format as the local listing. So carefully create a format where you are clear as to use ‘St.’ or ‘Street’ because it’s best not to leave anything to chance!

The next think that you have to work on are reviews. Have all your clients write reviews for you. Quality reviews in large numbers on your Google Places page holds high as a ranking factor.

After these basics, you can review your progress using the Get Listed tool. This free tool gives you a report showing existing business listings for your company on important platforms and also where they are missing. It would point out key areas where you need to get your business listed next. The tool gives you five important results: unclaimed listings, missing listings, found listings, reviews and to-do list. Other tools like Yext would help you ensure that information from your Google Places is spread on all the major local platforms – citations. You can also use the Local Analysis Google Place tools to optimize your places page.

Next work on your Social media profiles, show your NAP as listed on Google. This will help you get loads of local citations. Aside from regular on-page SEO, remember to make sure that the NAP is used on all of your website pages in the same format as your Google local listing. You should use the city and state name in meta descriptions, title tags and on the content of your website. Also, make it a point to use Schema local markup so that search engines can easily find you and your location. Finally, include a KML file on your site to display your location on a map.

Since local business SEO, requires you to gain as many quality citations as possible, blogging and guest blogging is a great way to do so. Here’s why Blogging will go a long way with local SEO:

• It will provide ongoing information to attract parts of Google’s algorithm to your site (fresh content added routinely counts well with Google.)
• Interactive content on blogs help fetch a higher prominence score in local search algorithms. Google favors Subscribers and frequent readers to a site.
• It gives your site a unique link profile.
• Gives you the advantage of ranking both in blog search and regular keyword search alongside local search fetching you greater exposure.
• Engage with other bloggers and drive traffic both ways with commentary write-ups and opinions.
• Helps build a forum to advertise or provide media or any other form of data whenever there is an event related to your industry.
• Your blog becomes a useful tool or your voice when you want to interact with your audience. It can be put to good use during reputation management.
• Blogs work as an excellent tool to feed content to Social media. It can be used as a feed source; content uploaded on the blog can be easily passed on to the various social media channels

SEO and local SEO services are more of an ongoing effort, it requires your attention and time to ensure that your business is benefitted from all your online effort. Hire an efficient local SEO company to handle and manage your online presence while you focus on key business responsibilities.

247Webpromotions provides comprehensive local SEO services to fetch you business better returns. We efficient manage your local business SEO to bring you better visibility and better returns.