3 Things Every Marketer Should Know About Local SEO
When it comes to ranking above the fold on Google, it can sometimes seem overwhelming for small, local businesses with limited marketing budgets to compete against multinational corporations who have their own in-house SEO teams. However, one significant area that Google continues to make adjustments to is local search.
Simply put, no two Googles are exactly the same. By this, we mean that on top of Google using each person’s personal search history to help produce a better targeted search results page, their algorithm also takes into heavy consideration your physical location when searching.
For example, the company Crocs should rank #1 in any city across the U.S. because they sell a product that is literally their brand name, making it easy for them to rank at top. However, let’s say there’s a local store in Wooster, Ohio that specializes in Crocs—we’ll call it Wooster Wendy’s Crocs. When someone is looking for Crocs in Wooster, Ohio or nearby, there’s a good chance that Wooster Wendy might outrank the national Croc’s site as it is optimized for local search—the location is in its URL and title tags, it is registered on Google places, it has locally-focused content–whereas Crocs doesn’t even have content on its website as to the stores in Wooster, Ohio that carries its product and thus trails behind Wendy’s in the search results.
The lesson to learn from this anecdote is that local search is anyone’s game, be it a corporation or a local business. So here are three of the most basic steps that every company should take when optimizing for local search.
- Keep You NAP Consistent
NAP stands for name, address, and phone number (including area code). The first rule of search marketing is making your site easy for searchers and search engines to find you and one of the best and most essential ways to do this is to have your NAP included as crawlable HTML text on your site, as well as coding XML schema with your NAP. On top of this, be sure to submit your NAP to Google Places, Bing, YP, and the other major local listing sites to maximize your reach, enabling people to not just find you on Google but on other search engines and directories as well.
- Make Location Pages
If you’re a business with multiple brick and mortar locations, then this is about as essential of a step as you get in local SEO. Make sure each location page has that store’s NAP along with its store hours, positive customer feedback, and as much information that is particular to that location as possible. By ensuring that you have a dedicated location page optimized for local search, that page has a good chance of competing against the local competition. If you just have one location, then create an About Us that is locally descriptive with content full of regionally-targeted keywords.
- Target Your Content
Whether you’re a large company with multiple locations or a local business competing for that top SERP spot in Google, content is your best friend. Create blog articles, videos, slide shows, and other content marketing tactics to establish your company as a local authority in your industry. Be sure to tailor your content to your particular niche; if you are a floral store, create a map of local botanical hot spots. This way, you can attract searchers who might not initially be looking for flowers, but by finding your engaging localized content, they now stand to be converted into new customers.
