How to Optimize Your Website for Local Searches

Optimize Your Homepage.

Your homepage should very clearly state who you are, where you're located and what you do. Make it easy on Google to understand these elements of your business. Your page title tag, header tag and meta description should clearly state this information. If you're using WordPress to build your website, you can easily update your website page title tag under Settings > General in the left navigation. You can also easily load your page meta data via the Yoast SEO plugin , which brings me to my next point.

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Add Schema Markup to Your Website

Schema markup helps Google match your business to local searchers. Although schema doesn’t directly impact rankings, it does help Google organize your data and it helps your data show up in relevant search results. The best part? You don’t have to be a developer or know code to implement schema markup! Here’s a great resource that will walk you through the steps of implementing schema markup for your local business. Place your schema markup wherever you describe your business on your website. If your organization has multiple locations, you’ll want to add schema markup to each city page.

Plan your complete on-page SEO strategy with this free worksheet.

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Make sure your site is mobile-friendly

When a site is mobile-friendly, it is responsive and can adapt to any screen size. Any SEO checklist will tell you to use a responsive site because it is both an SEO ranking factor and customer expectation. Mobile sites perform better in search and provide a better experience for users.

Mobile-friendliness is especially essential for local search, as many people use their mobile device to search for local businesses. A study by BrightLocal found that 77% of people used a mobile device to search for a local business.

Plus, mobile-friendly sites are easier to navigate, which can lead to a longer time on a site and higher conversions. This can also send positive behavioral signals to Google and boost search rankings.

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Create a Page for Every Product, Service and Location.

Stop trying to consolidate, it's not helpful for SEO and it's not helpful for local SEO. In order to apply product/service schema to each of your individual product/service offerings, they have to have their own page. So not only is this an overall SEO best practice, as it helps to paint a more clear sitemap for search engines and also helps your product/service pages rank for that specific offering, it opens the door to specific schema applications. Below are all of our service offerings, which can be found in our sitemap . If we had one page that said "Our Services" and no other individualized pages, do you think we'd ever rank for Local SEO or Social Media or Web Design with a web page labeled "Our Services?" Doubtful.

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Keep Your Business Information Consistent

Consistency is key for local SEO and if your business operates in the United States, you’ll want to double and triple check that citations about your address, location, hours, and other important company information is the same across the board on the following four map data aggregators:

These aggregators provide a large amount of the map data for Apple, Yelp, Bing, Google, Trip Advisor, and others. If you happen to have any discrepancies or incorrect information about your business out there on the web, your business may not show up in search results because Google can’t determine which source contains the correct information. Even small mistakes like abbreviations not being consistent across all online platforms can cause confusion for search engines.

Another issue that can hinder your local SEO efforts are duplicate listings. Google My Business pages are where you will often find duplicates that can contain conflicting information. Take an audit of the online spaces where your information is housed to make sure it’s error, discrepancy, and duplicate free.

To get started with this task, first nail down your NAP (name, address, and phone number) which you should include as a crawlable HTML text on your site. A great location for your NAP is in the header or footer of your website. However, take care to avoid including the MAP into an image as images cannot be crawled from search engines like HTML’s can.

Once you've established your NAP, you can check for duplicate listings. The easiest way to check for duplicates on the major platforms is to use a free tool like Moz Check Listing.

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Regularly write and post new local content.

Adding new content to a website, especially as a value-adding blog post, is essential for every website.

When you create new location-based content with your keywords, it makes what you’re saying even more valuable—whether it’s a press release about something you are doing in the community or a review of a new local service.

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Implement SEO Best Practices Throughout Your Website.

Yes, this might seem obvious -- and it is, but it is so often ignored. At the end of the day, if you add band-aids to a boat with holes, it might help, but it's not going to make it sail across the ocean. It will sink if it's not properly attended to. Websites are the same way. This is your home on the internet. Treat it with some TLC. Plus, the better search engine optimized your website, the better your content strategy , the better your blog posts , the more quality in-bound links you'll naturally drive. And you want to do drive quality links because they are a major ranking factor for local SEO as well as your natural rankings in SERPs.

Source: brainchildstudios.com