Whether you are running a brick and mortar business in your locality, or running an online business to serve locality specific customers, local SEO is the only way to go about. Local SEO is a strategic way to serve geographically specific target customers better, without having to worry much about the competition in the vicinity.

In today’s rat race to stay atop of SEO results, it is very important to optimize your website for local search results. Only then can your digital strategy lay actual fruit. If you fail to practice due diligence when to comes to your local SEO, you maybe be actually endangering your own livelihood. Here are some local SEO tips, for both small and big businesses alike, to beat your local and national competitors, right in their face!

1. Get Your Title and Description in Order

Since the space for crafting your title & description is limited, use it wisely. The title of your web page gives the customer an idea of what the content is all about. To expand it better, your description comes handy. Make sure your title & description convey exactly what your business is to your customers and make sure they promote your brand well.

2. Get Citations & Make NAP Consistent

Citations are listings of your name, address and phone number (NAP) details on various aggregator and local business listing sites. They help to display your business when customers search for you. Maintaining a consistent NAP is the only way to add trust and credibility to your business.

3. Get on Google My Business

This Google product should be your first priority when you start listing your business. GMB allows you to furnish every tiny detail your business. This is a very trusted platform as Google verifies the business to avoid imposters from claiming the ownership of your business.

4. Use Schema Markup

Structured data such as schema. org  markup and data highlighting give an additional detailed information of your business to crawlers like Google. Many competitors aren’t even aware about this, let alone use it. And that’s where you can leverage your business opportunity. This task is complicated and requires professional skills and is best if a web developer helps you in it.

5. Link to Inner Pages

Linking specific words or phrases to your own inner web pages helps is attaining excellent flow and rotation of traffic. Sure inbound linking gets you referral traffic, but it is very much important to link one web page to another, within your website, which sometimes helps in reducing exit rates.

6. Blog Consistency

Consistently creating and posting content adds credibility to your brand name. If you publish blogs on your website and have regular visitors reading your blogs, then you should leverage all this traffic by feeding them content at regular intervals. These customers look upto you as a trusted source of information and you wouldn’t want to let them down.

7. Mobile Responsive Site

This is the one of the first parameters that Google ticks off its check list when indexing and ranking your website. If your website is not mobile responsive or mobile friendly, you will lose out on a lot of potential and returning customers as they will not be happy with the user experience of your website. Around 70% of people have mobile phones today, and it is a shame if brands don’t optimize the content and user interface to enrich user experience.

8. Focus on Page Speed

Another factor to consider is the page speed. If your site loads slower than 3 seconds, be sure to lose your customer to your competitors. A lot of factors contribute to the speed, which again requires a professional approach and is best tackled by a web developer.

9. Create Location-Specific Landing Pages for Multiple Locations

If you have expanded from being a local brand to a national brand, you can still win the local SEO race by simply creating location specific landing pages to serve your local customers. Be sure to furnish your NAP details correctly for each location to enable customers to reach you better.

10. Use Regional Keywords

A generic keyword, with high search volumes and high competition, won’t bring in much business as compared to a high search volume keyword which is branded locally. Since your business is present in a specific area or locality, use that locality name as the prefix or suffix of the high volume keyword to rank higher for local page results.

11. Optimize for Voice Search

With the advent of improved technology, more and more users are now moving towards using voice search as compared to text based searches. With personal voice assistants like Alexa (Amazon), Siri, (Apple), Google Assistant and Cortana (Microsoft) already winning hearts with their aid to ease customers’ experience, brands should optimize their websites for voice search as many users primarily use them for local searches.

12. ORM for Reviews

It is a two way street- Customers need to see reviews to believe that the brand is in good business and on the other hand, reviews are social proof that customers are actually turning in for experience. Whether positive or negative, reviews shouldn’t be left unattended since a well-crafted response is the only way to beat your competition.

13. Backlinks from High DA Sites

Good inbound links will automatically position your website on top of the search engine result page. Sites with high domain authority (DA) help in building quality links back to your website. This leaves less room for bad or suspicious link and filters them, which could otherwise bring down the website DA too. Higher the number of inbound links, higher are the chances of automatically showing up in top results.

This was just the tip of the iceberg. A thorough local SEO strategy can help your brand attain the top position in the first page of the search results. Research, diligence and staying updated on the latest trends and algorithm changes is the key to never losing out in the race.