12 Tactics for Boosting Your Local SEO

By improving your local SEO, you stand to increase your online visibility, improve search engine performance, reduce your bounce rates and attract local customers to your business.

Unlock Your Local Success Potential

Before you begin implementing the 12 tips below, you will need know your target audience. Get to know their demographics, such as their preferences, behaviours, location, search habits and interests.  Use that information to define your strategies when implementing local SEO.

Ready to get started? Let’s do this!

12 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Local SEO:

1. CREATE AND OPTIMISE YOUR GOOGLE BUSINESS PROFILE
   This will help you get the most out of your local SEO website optimisation. Keep this up to date, adding relevant information such as your business name, phone number, address and your trading hours. This will help you also build credibility and trust locally as satisfied customers might be encouraged to leave positive reviews and ratings.
2. CREATE LOCATION TARGETED LANDING PAGES
   When servicing various areas, location-specific landing pages can be useful to target your local audience in a specific area or region.
3. USE RELEVANT KEYWORDS
   Mention words on your web pages that are relevant to the search’s others would type into a search engine (in their many variations) to find your products and services.
4. LOCALISE WEB CONTENT
   Start by adapting online material to suit the cultural preferences, language, and needs of specific target audiences in different regions. This process may include translating text, adjusting visuals, and incorporating relevant local information to ensure a seamless user experience. It is essential for reaching diverse markets and enhancing global reach and engagement. Craft content to display local keywords using the town, city, suburbs or regions relevant to your local searches, adding them as SEO keywords to headings and content. Refrain from being repetitive with keywords to avoid cannibalisation – when multiple pages target the same keyword causing them to compete with each other. This may result in have the effect of reducing rankings and overall visibility.
5. LEVERAGE LOCAL LISTING POWER
   Submit your business to local directories and platforms like ‘Yellow Pages’, ‘Yelp’ or ‘True Local’ and other industry specific classifieds where your audience is likely to be searching for products and services.i By leveraging local business or industry listings you give your business a visibility on the search engine, so that your web pages are more likely to come up on search engine results pages.
6. MOBILE & SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMISATION
   Google prefers mobile-friendly responsive and fast loading websites (use caching), prioritising those that deliver a great user experience to rank higher on the search engine. Also optimise your web pages to render well on Social media platform when posting a link.
7. CREATE A CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY
   To create a local content marketing strategy, start by defining your target audience, conducting local market research, identifying key local platforms, creating relevant and engaging content tailored to the local audience, and promoting it through various channels. Regularly analyse performance metrics and adjust your strategy accordingly to achieve the desired results.
8. ADD LOCAL BACKLINKS
   Start by creating relevant high-quality content your local audience will be interested in. Reach out to local organisations and businesses to request backlinks. Network with other local businesses.
9. CLICK TO CALL BUTTONS
   Make it easy for mobile users to get in touch by adding a clickable telephone call button. E.g. code for adding clickable phone numbers: ‘tel:123456789’ without adding any spaces or inverted commas. Test your button.
10. JOIN LOCAL SOCIAL MEDIA GROUPS
    Choose platforms popular with that demographic. Create engaging content relevant to the business and community, and actively engage with followers. Utilize local hashtags, geotagging, and collaborations with other local businesses to increase visibility. Monitor insights and adjust strategy as needed to drive traffic and sales. Tip: Use local hashtags. Mixt them up to use up to 30 relevant hashtags with all of your social media posts. (A minimum ten.)
11. USE SCHEMA MARKUP
    To use schema markup for local SEO, include structured data on your website such as business name, address, phone number, hours of operation, and reviews. Use Local Business or Organisation schema markup for better visibility in search results. Test your markup using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to ensure it is properly implemented.
12. USE REPUTABLE SEO PLUGINS
    Up your local SEO game by installing and configuring the paid versions of any of these two reputable plugins that are well documented and supported. These work well with any WordPress theme.  Compare their pricing plans and features.
    1. All-in-One SEO Pack Plugin (AIOSEO) More affordable. This is the one I use for its add ons, great features and user interface. I love its free SEO audit tool. It really helps me to refine my SEO!
    2. Yoast SEO. Not as refined. Yoast seems to have an outdated user interface. But still a good option. Priced a bit dearer than AIOSEO.

By implementing the local SEO search strategies mentioned above, you stand to attract your local target market and engage your audience with valuable information that will increase your chances of being hired or making that sale.

Attention Business Owners and WordPress DIYers!  Need Help?

If you’re working on your local SEO and get stuck Contact Sandra Ciminelli for technical support. I’m a local WordPress Freelancer located in Canberra with services available Australia-wide.