Local SEO is necessary to smaller businesses that operate on a regional, as opposed to a national, level.
While national SEO focuses further on ranking in searches beyond the country, local SEO prioritizes rising on SERPs in a specific location. This strategy relies on marketing your products, brand, and services to local leads & customers.
Optimizing your local SEO means more website traffic, leads, and conversions since the strategy is more relevant to your base of local customers. Think of this focused strategy as a way to help you fight more effectively against larger national brands that have unlimited resources to spend.
By converging on specific local-SEO to-dos, you can neutralize the influence of bigger brands that routinely optimize for broader keywords and rely on brand recognition, instead of value propositions, to bring in traffic.
Further, 40% of all search traffic is local according to an estimate in a 2018 ReviewTrackers’ study. Without local SEO, your business /product /brand could be losing out on a significant amount of traffic.
How Local Pittsburgh SEO experts work today?
SEO expert job to keep pace with Google’s variances and optimize your web site to rank on the first page of Google. And that is the only point every business owner wants it to be.
how well a web site ranks on Google’s first page for several Local SEO relevant search terms.
Suggestions to get on the top of Google:–
– Best quality links. It is NOT about volume but quality.
– Don’t overdo your link building. Google flags websites that have an unexpected influx of links.
– Don’t use the same anchor text. Turn it and NEVER do the same.
– Get a variety of links. Related web directories work well now.
– Make sure your links are contextual, meaning they are on a page that has relevant content to what you are trying to rank for.
Here are the 6 SEO Mistakes that Hurt Local SEO Rankings in Google.
- Inconsistent Business Listings.
When Google crawls the web to manage search results, it looks at all the cases where your company’s NAP (name, address and phone number) details are located or appear on other websites (primarily business citations). If all these business citations listings don’t match correctly or have consistent NAP on Yelp, Yellow Pages, Angieslist, etc., Google understands your business as less important and trustworthy, which pushes you down the list of search results. Getting your Google My Business listing in order will do wonders for your company’s local search ranking.
- Keyword Diversity.
Some companies attempt to “stuff” as many keywords into their websites as possible without worrying about the readability or usefulness of the content. This is a tactic that Google penalizes. Avoid it! Concentrate instead on using keywords to enhance the user experience and content that your customers will find useful.
Keywords are key to your local search ranking. First, you have to think about the terms your clients use to look for a business like yours. (Online tools like Google Trends assist with this.) Second, if you’re fighting to play with other companies to rank for general terms like “locksmith,” try targeting a niche business with long-tail keywords like “emergency 24-hour locksmith”
- Link Blasting.
Beware of using link networks, private blog networks PBN, and link automation/software, and don’t trust SEO agencies that attempt to build hundreds of links for a cheap price. Building backlinks organically through authentic coverage and clarity of your business is a great way to boost your local SEO, but Google penalizes sites who try to cheat the system by giving for links or using black hat / spammy link building tactics.
- Lack of Content.
If there’s no content on your websites, like an about, testimonials/reviews, services, features, newsletters, and a blog, there’s not much for visitors to interact with let alone for the search engines to understand what website is all about.
On the other hand, helpful content (like press releases PR or blog posts) encourages engagement, shares, and traffic, all of which help increase your local search ranking. This is especially true if you tie your content to local stories and news.
- Lack of Reviews.
Online reviews send great signals to search engines. Lots of reviews from customers show that you’re involved with customers and that the customers had a great experience or are happy with your help. This activity makes it more accessible for other people to find your business when they make a local search. Plus, 80% of consumers trust online reviews just as much as friends. If you don’t have any actual reviews, start asking your happy customers to go online and leave you one.
- Mobile-Friendly Website.
Google also now ranks your website based on Google’s mobile-friendly test, as well as the bounce rate, i.e. how many people leave your site quickly after clicking on it.
With the large rise in mobile searches, it’s vital that your website is easy to operate on a smartphone and in other words, is not only mobile-friendly but user-friendly. That way, mobile searchers will hold around and will most possible contact your business (call / online inquiry) instead of going because of bad navigation and a non-mobile-friendly website.