How To Dominate Local SEO In 2017

SEO is always evolving. As more businesses compete for the top spots in SERPs, best practices will change, constant updates for software will be released, and new algorithms will be implemented. If you manage a local shop or small business, using local SEO can help you expose your business to more potential customers and build an attractive online presence. Find out how you can grow your business with proven local SEO strategies, and improve your rankings in search engine results.

Manage Your Business Listings for Better Online Visibility

Business listings are important as they make your business visible online. That’s why potential customers have higher chances of finding you if you create more listings. Whether it is local citations or business listings, they are both important to major search engines such as Google. They are also key factors in ranking algorithms used to create search engine results. Psst! Businesses with more citations tend to rank higher than a business with less.

Publish Locally Optimized Content Regularly

Today, people are still using search engines to find information. When you create content that provides information people seek, make sure you use sufficient graphics, visuals, clear call to actions to attract attention-deficient readers. Remember, search engines always prefer fresh content (you can call that evergreen content too). You might want to consider using your blog to publish content that answers the questions people ‘ask’ in search engines.

It is a good practice to include your local keywords in the tags, headings, and titles consistently and organically – search engines hate spam-like content! If you publish locally optimized content consistently, search engine web crawlers will remember that your site is a top destination for people who search for your type of business.

Ensure You Have Complete Google My Business Listings

Never underestimate the power of complete Google My Business listings. They are important to ranking in Google search results. What’s more, complete Google business listings can influence search engine users to take action. For example, users, who view more complete listings, show a higher tendency to visit a store or even purchase products from it.

Google likes to give accurate and most current business listings in its search results to its users – you know what to do now. If you are able to optimize and verify your Google My Business listing with five-star reviews, you have a shot at showing up in the top three most relevant results for local search!

Optimize Your Mobile-Friendly Website for Faster Loading Times

Search engines favor sites that are not only mobile-friendly but load fast. What’s more, fast loading mobile-friendly websites are preferred by customers and search engine users alike. To create a faster loading website, you can start removing unused plugins; enabling browser cache and Gzip compression; minifying JavaScript, CSS, and HTML; and optimizing images.

Post More Customer Reviews Where They Matter Most

In order to develop a sound local SEO strategy, you need to know that customer reviews are known to be a big influence on ranking power. Google tends to show snippets of reviews on SERPs and even put them front and center in the three-pack. You should aim to get those golden stars to appear with schema reviews markups. They help your business stand out and increase your click-through rates. Now that you know that customer reviews have a direct impact on local search results, you should do what you can to influence how highly you are rated as well as how often you get reviewed.

A reminder for effective reputation management: After automating your promotions and customer review gathering, you should continuously post the best reviews with the highest ratings where your customers will see them. In addition, you can visit Google Developers’ Structured Data page to find out more about enabling rich snippets for reviews and ratings.