Comprehensive Local SEO Guide for Beginners – PDF Download
Local SEO
What is local SEO?
Local SEO is a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that helps your business be more visible in local search results on Google. Any business that has a physical location or serves a geographic area can benefit from local SEO.
It is all about making your product and or services more accessible to your local region by using the best practices in Google My Business and other local business directories. This is achieved organically without advertising. It is also about various other platforms you can use for the same purpose. Let’s try to understand Local SEO in detail.
Why is local SEO important?
While each local business is unique, nearly all of them need to be discoverable online. Practices like optimizing a website, creating local business listings and Social Media presence, managing reviews, and earning links all share the goal of driving increased online engagement.
What do you need to start local SEO? 4 Important Factors.
1) The guidelines for representing your business on Google
2) Basic business data
3) Clear identification of the business model
4) A clear statement of business goals
Try to formulate an answer to that question by defining success as:
An Increase in
- Foot traffic
- Phone calls
- Transactions
- Form submission leads
- Requests for driving directions
- Links
- Positive reviews
- Local pack visibility for Keyword phrases
Who Won’t Benefit from Local SEO?
While as SEO professionals we would love to see everyone benefit from local SEO and sell these services to more clients, the reality is that some businesses just don’t lend themselves well to local SEO efforts.
Businesses like ecommerce businesses (online-only,) local authors, businesses that don’t want to share their local information, and private online sellers who want to keep their information private are likely not great candidates for local SEO services.
What Are the Important Parts of Local SEO?
When it comes to local SEO, it isn’t all that different from organic SEO – keyword research, content, links, and on-page technical SEO. It just has a local focus.
These elements are important to get right for your website and its industry overall to outperform the competition in the SERPs.
When optimizing for local search, however, these parts contain more of a local focus that focuses on searches people are performing in the immediate area surrounding the business (e.g., local city names).
The Importance of Content to Your Local SEO Efforts
Content with a local focus has significant importance on local SEO efforts.
Depending on your industry, content with local focus, depth, breadth, and knowledge tends to do well.
However, just writing long-form content won’t necessarily always produce the best results.
It all depends on the nature of the results of your query, and whether this content fits the user intent behind the query the best. It’s not about whether it has the highest word count for the query.
Writing custom local content with all of these factors will help you achieve the quality content Google wants to return for certain local results.
What should you not do when it comes to content?
Long Story Telling-type content is the worst type of content you could write.
The reason why this is the worst type of content is that not only is the content usually thin, the value that it brings and the value of the research put into the content is usually just as thin.
Thin content adds little value to your SEO efforts.
Local SEO Links
For local SEO, links are a little bit different than organic SEO.
First, you must consider Google’s Webmaster Guidelines when acquiring all links. You don’t want your link acquisition efforts to result in a manual action (i.e., penalty) from Google.
If you build links that violate any of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, Google will eventually detect them. The next thing you know; your entire website could disappear from the organic search results.
Local SEO Link Categories
In local SEO, various link categories make up a quality local SEO link profile. These include:
- Citation / NAP sites.
- Local directory websites.
- Industry-related local sites.
- Local partner sites.
- The local chamber of commerce sites.
- Local newspaper sites.
Citation / NAP sites
These sites are where you submit your money site to increase its local search presence.
These citation sites are usually NAP-focused.
What does NAP mean? It means the name, address, and phone number of your business that you wish to appear on these sites.
The function of these citation sites is to increase your citation / NAP presence on Google.
Local Directory Websites
Next, it is recommended that you focus on local directories as the general link categories.
Building out these local directories will help you increase your website’s link authority for local searches.
Industry-Related Local Sites
Think about any local sites that might offer local link opportunities, including:
- Newspapers
- Schools
- Universities
- Government associations
- Clubs and Recreation Centres
These industry-related local sites will usually help increase the value of your local link profile significantly, and will usually help add the authority and uniqueness that Google rewards.
Local Partner Websites
These sites are usually local partners of the business.
Google forbids excessive link exchanges, but enlisting the aid of your business partners locally to achieve links isn’t a bad thing.
You just don’t want to do link exchanges excessively in a scheme to manipulate page rank.
It can be challenging to figure out what counts as excessive, but it is possible to achieve through the right testing.
What is Local Citation?
In simple SEO terms, a local citation refers to any mention of your company online. This could be in a business directory, or on an industry-specific site, a blog or any other local website. Although local citations can help you rank in local search results, they are no longer a major ranking factor
In local search engine optimization (SEO), citations are mentions of your business’s name, address, and phone number (commonly referred to as NAP) on a website that isn’t your own.
Why are citations important?
Citations are useful for two main things:
- Ranking higher for local search queries
- Helping people discover your business online
How do citations help with local SEO?
Citations are believed to help search engines verify the existence, legitimacy, and trustworthiness of your business. If the same details appear across many relevant and trusted websites, then Google likely has increased confidence that your business exists, is operational, and that what you say about it is true.
Citations are the fifth most important ranking signal for local queries.
Getting local citations from anywhere and everywhere is unlikely to have a big impact on your local rankings. However, we believe that there’s still some value in getting citations from relevant, trusted sources where people expect your business to be listed.
How citations help people to discover your business?
People don’t always use Google to find local businesses. They often turn to sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and specialist directories. That’s one of the reasons why it’s useful to get listed on these sites.
The other reason is that business directories often dominate search results for local queries.
What type of citations are there?
Before we talk about how to build citations, we need to understand the type of citations you can get.
Structured citations
A structured citation lists the name, address, and phone number (NAP) of a business. Directory listings and social media profiles are good examples of these. Each company’s information is displayed in the same way, and the page is effectively built around that data.
How do I build citations?
Most businesses will benefit from having some structured and unstructured citations. But there’s no need to get them from every site you come across. It’s very much a case of quality trumps quantity here.
Follow these four steps to build the citations you need:
- Get listed with the ‘big three’ data aggregators
- Submit to other core sites
- Submit to popular industry and local sites
- Pursue unstructured citations
Step 1. Get listed with the data aggregators
There are thousands of business directories on the web. If each of them relied on business owners submitting NAP information directly, they’d probably have a lot of gaps in their data. Most business owners just aren’t going to submit to thousands of websites.
Data aggregators solve this problem. These companies collect information about businesses and distribute it to hundreds of other websites. If these folks have your information, you’ll end up with citations in lots of places.
Step 2. Submit to other core sites
The data aggregators distribute NAP information to many well-known sites, but not all of them. That’s why it’s often useful to submit to the core sites in your country directly.
These are sites like:
- Apple Maps
- Bing Places for Business
- Yellow Pages
- Just Dial
Step 3. Submit to popular industry and local sites
Now that you’ve taken care of the “baseline” citations, the next step is to hunt down popular industry-and-geo-specific citation opportunities.
For example, if you run a hotel, you’ll want to make sure you’re listed on TripAdvisor, MyMYTrip. If you’re an attorney, then you’ll want to make sure you’re on legalserviceindia.com. If you’re a realtor, then you should be on realtor.com. You get the picture. These are industry-specific citation opportunities.
The physical location of your business will give way to more citation opportunities. For instance, you’ll probably want to get listed with the local Chamber of Commerce and other local business associations.
Step 4. Pursue unstructured citations
If you’ve gotten to this stage, then you’ve likely already trumped most of your competitors when it comes to structured citations. What we haven’t talked about yet are unstructured citations.
Unstructured citations are a different beast altogether. They tend to come from press mentions, reviews, and blog posts about your business. That means they’re harder to get than structured citations. Someone has to care enough about your business to write about it.
10 Best Practices and Bonus Tips
- Optimize for Google My Business
- Engage on social media and add posts to Google My Business
- Ensure your name, address, and phone number are consistent online
- Optimize online directories and citations
- Perform a local SEO audit
- Improve your internal linking structure
- Optimize URL, title tags, headers, meta description, and content
- Add location pages to your website
- Create local content
- Participate in your local community
Google My Business, how to Create your Presence.
Create a Google My Business Listing
1: Log in to the Google Account you want to be associated with your business (or create a Google Account if you don’t already have one).
2: Go to google.com/business and select “Start now” in the top right-hand corner.
3: Enter your business name.
4: Enter your business address.
5: If you go to your customers’ locations, rather than having them come to you, check the box “I deliver goods and services to my customers.” And if you work out of your house or another address you don’t want publicly shown, Check “Hide my address (it’s not a store) Only show region.” Finally, select your Delivery area.
6: Choose your business category. Try to choose the most accurate category possible — you’re essentially telling Google which type of customers should see your business listing.
Step 7: Add your business phone number or website.
Step 8: Choose a verification option. If you’re not ready to verify your business yet, click “Try a different method” → “Later.”
How to Verify Your Business on Google
There are several ways to verify your GMB listing
- Postcard
- By phone
- By email
- Instant verification
- Bulk verification
Postcard Verification
Step 1: If you aren’t already logged into Google My Business, sign in now and choose the business you want to verify. (If you’re already logged in, you’ll be at the verification step.)
Step 2: Make sure your business address is correct. Optional: Add a contact name — that’s who the postcard will be addressed to.
Step 3: Click “Mail.” The postcard should reach you in five days — make sure you don’t edit your business name, address, or category (or request a new code) before it comes, because this could delay the process.
Step 4: Once you’ve gotten the postcard, log into Google My Business. If you have more than one business location, select the location you want to verify. If you only have one, select “Verify now.”
Step 5: In the Code field, enter the five-digit verification code on your postcard. Click “Submit.”
If your postcard never shows up, or you lose it, you can request a new code by signing into Google My Business and clicking the “Request another code” blue banner at the top of the screen.
Phone verification
Google lets some businesses verify their location by phone. If you’re eligible, you’ll see the “Verify by phone” option when you start the verification process.
Step 1: If you aren’t already logged into Google My Business, sign in now and choose the business you want to verify. (If you’re already logged in, you’ll be at the verification step.)
Step 2: Make sure your phone number is correct, then choose “Verify by phone.”
Step 3: Enter the verification code from the text you receive.
Email verification
Google lets some businesses verify their location by phone. If you’re eligible, you’ll see the “Verify by email” option when you start the verification process.
Step 1: If you aren’t already logged into Google My Business, sign in now and choose the business you want to verify. (If you’re already logged in, you’ll be at the verification step.)
Step 2: Make sure your email address is correct, then choose “Verify by email.”
Step 3: Go to your inbox, open the email from Google My Business, and click the verification button in the email.
Instant verification
If you’ve already verified your business with Google Search Console (a free tool that lets you manage your website’s search performance and health), you might be able to instantly verify your email.
Sign into Google My Business with the same account you used to verify your business with Google Search Console. (Some business categories aren’t eligible for instant verification, so if you don’t get a notification asking you to verify the listing, you’ll have to use a different verification method.)
Bulk verification
If you operate more than 10 locations for the same business — and you’re not a service business or an agency managing locations for multiple businesses — you might be eligible for bulk verification.
1: If you aren’t already logged into Google My Business, sign in now and choose a location. Click “Get verified” next to its name.
2: Click “Chain.”
3: Fill out the verification form with your business name (as well as the parent company, if applicable), country or countries where you operate, all contact names (i.e. everyone who will be using the Google My Business account), contact phone number, business manager email (someone at the business who can verify you’re a representative of that business), and the email address of your Google Account Manager.
4: Submit the verification form. It can take up to a week for Google to review and process your claim.
Double Bonus Tip:
In Google My Business Reviews, try to get your business named by your clients, when they are writing the reviews. The more your business name is taken the better it is, but make sure it is done genuinely.
