How to Dominate Local Search: A Checklist

As a business owner, you have a lot to do. You’re the cleaning crew, the accountant, and the customer service rep. And that’s in addition to making your product or delivering your service. Spending time and money on digital marketing may be the last thing on your to-do list, but it’s crucial for capturing local business. While traditional marketing (TV, radio, print, etc.) can be effective (although are losing effectiveness quickly), leveraging digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) can expand your reach locally and beyond.

Learn better with video? Below is a short video on my checklist for how to dominate local SEO.

Measuring Your Success with Local Search Traffic

To start dominating local search engine traffic in your area, the first step is take a measure of where you are. Consider the following:

• You should know the physical range of the web traffic to your site and concentrate on drawing in traffic from the users closest to your business. Location-specific landing pages are perfect options for local businesses with multiple locations, enabling you to hyper-focus web traffic as desired.
• Earning feedback from your customers will boost your online reputation and help build credibility among potential new customers. Make sure you ask customers to post reviews to increase your visibility.
• Google and other search engines reward sites that consistently update their content and build good link history. Dead or broken links on your site will drive down search engine performance.
• Domain authority. This is essentially your search engine score that will determine your business’s search engine result page rankings. Higher domain authority means better rankings.
• Your Google My Business Google offers business owners a fantastic degree of customization for their search engine listings. Inaccurate or incomplete listings will harm your business’s search engine rankings. Active management of your Google My Business listing helps maintain search engine rankings over time.
• Business title with keywords. When a user searches for keywords relevant to your business, your web content will rank higher in the user’s search results if your business title includes accurate, relevant keywords.

Once you understand these metrics and how to measure them over time, start developing a plan to capture more local search traffic.

RELATED ARTICLE: How to Dominate Local Search in 2019

Steps to Improve Your Local Search Engine Rankings

If you’re looking for ways to boost local search traffic and draw in more leads from Google, Bing, and other major search engines, start with the following tips:

Ensure your website is mobile friendly

More consumers than ever are using mobile devices to research brands and complete purchases. If your website doesn’t look or function correctly on mobile devices, you will likely increase your bounce rate as users click away from your site once they notice it doesn’t load properly. Work with your web development team and ensure collaboration with your marketing and SEO teams so the structure of your site and functionality issues do not impede search traffic to your website.

Optimize your Google My Business listing

The Google My Business toolkit allows business owners to edit their Google listings, increasing search traffic by drawing users who search for specific words. Ensure your listing is entirely accurate and keep it updated if any of your business’s basic information changes.

Create content for local search

Google and other search engines don’t just look at your business listing and keywords; they also scan the content on your website and raise or lower your ranking based on its quality. Develop content geared toward the local market you’re trying to capture; Google will direct local search traffic to the sites that have the most content relevant to the local search engine user base.

RELATED ARTICLE: Think Outside the Blog – Fresh Content Marketing Ideas

These tips can help your business rank higher in local searches and draw more local search traffic to your website. Consistent attention to your Google My Business listing, developing content geared toward a local audience, and solid web development can lay the foundation for very successful local search traffic growth.

Toledo SEO for Growth offers data-driven SEO services, digital marketing, and web design to help small businesses.

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