Do you know that 46% of Google searches are local? So, if you run a brick and mortar store or a multi-location business and want people to find your brand through search, you need a local SEO strategy.
When you optimize your site for local search, you can easily find people interested or highly motivated to purchase. Or avail of the services that you offer at the same time.
What Is Local SEO?
In a nutshell, it is an SEO strategy that allows your business to become more visible in local search results.
Local SEO essential if you’re a small local business. That’s because it can help you be visible on searches depending on a person’s location or intent.
For instance, you own a bakery, and someone within your 100m perimeter is looking for an open bread store through his phone. If you’re implementing Local SEO properly, your bakery should appear on the search results.
The same thing goes if someone from Turkey searches for “where to buy pita in New York,” and your store happened to be in Brooklyn.
The cool thing about this is that you can hire marketing agencies that offer Local SEO packages to boost your brick-and-mortar store’s online visibility.
In this post, we’ll be discussing the eight ways you can optimize your site for local search:
1. Add Schema Markup
Schema markup will allow Google to match your brand or business with other local searches. Although it doesn’t necessarily impact your rankings on search, it helps Google organize your data. Then, showing that data on relevant searches.
The best part about adding a schema markup is that you don’t need to learn how to code or be a developer to implement it successfully.
Whenever you want to describe your business or brand in your site, use schema markup. If you’re in different locations, you might want to add schema markup to every city/location page.
2. Have Individual Product Pages
To effectively apply your product or service schema to each of your products’ offerings, they need to have their own page.
This is an excellent SEO best practice, but it also helps you create a precise sitemap for search engines. Apart from that, it allows service and product pages rank for a particular offering, and opens new doors for specific schema locations.
3. List Your Business On Social Media
If you don’t have a business page on Facebook, then you should do it now. Social signals that point to your direction is another excellent ranking signal for local SEO.
You don’t have to do a lot with it. The sheer existence of your Facebook business page is better than none.
Nonetheless, your social media strategy enables you to reach more people, regardless of their location. So long as you keep sharing relevant content that resonates with them.
4. Optimize Page Load Speed
The page load speed on mobile is one of the most crucial factors added to the Google Speed Update. To improve your local SEO rankings, you need to improve your page load speed.
But how do you do that? The first thing that you need to do is to check your site’s current load speed. There are free Google tools that will help you do this, like PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse.
If your website is slow to load on desktop and mobile devices, you risk losing out on Google’s top position. You’re also bound to lose out traffic.
Fortunately, there are a lot of steps that you can take to avoid that. You can use AMP for content, compress your images, or first display above the fold content.
5. Have A Mobile-friendly Website Design
Now, more than ever, you need to have a mobile site that’s mobile responsive. Offering the best experience possible for mobile users is essential if you want to optimize your website for search results.
Mobile has become more and more prevalent as a device of choice for a lot of people. A lot of them are using their smartphones or tablets to look up local businesses online. Ensuring that your site offers that same quality of experience on mobile, as they would in a desktop, is essential.
To check whether your site is mobile-friendly or not, you can run it on Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. See to it that you’re also using mobile-friendly fonts, and don’t have a lot of substantial text blocks.
