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We are all well aware of the importance of local SEO for promotion in SERPs. This is especially relevant for certain types of businesses that have a strong local clientele, such as restaurants, cafes, hairdressers, event venues and more. While this article is not exhaustive, we aim to offer a few top tips on how to improve your local SEO. For the best local-related optimisations, it might be best to work with a local SEO services agency.
Add local information on the page
When aiming to improve local SEO and strengthen a geo-local connection, it is necessary to add local information to your website’s contact page. If your site has multiple location pages, make sure that your address is included on each of them.
It will also prove extremely beneficial to include local keywords within page titles and H1 headings. Since Google has recently increased the character limit for meta descriptions to 320 characters, this can be used to your advantage as you should have space to include keywords here too.
There are several features you can add to your website to do with the local area you are targeting, which will tell search engines that your site is relevant to this town or neighbourhood. One way to do this is to create content related to the area; perhaps about its history or a notable venue, and include a description of the area. Alternatively, adding a video overview of the local area could offer an engaging piece of content, and adding a video description mentioning the location will be of benefit for your SEO.
Some other measures could potentially help improve your local SEO, such as adding geo-meta tags. However, according to the latest information, these tags are supported by Bing, but not by Google. For the latter, targeting a particular country can be configured inside Google Search Console. In any case, optimising the names and alt tags of your images to include relevant keywords will improve your SEO. One more tactic is to amend the EXIF data of each image in the same way.
Local business schema markup is valuable for SEO, so be sure to create this for each location you want to target.
Let your client base know where you are
Another opportunity to enhance your local SEO is to publish testimonials from local customers and clients, especially if you have specific location pages to publish these on. When doing this, be sure to encode the locations in Schema review markup.
Adding directions to the location of your business could also help indicate that this area is relevant for you, particularly if you include the street names and postcodes of the surrounding area. On a slightly more technical note, adding a “get directions” link will transfer users to a maps application (on mobile) or Google Maps (on a desktop) so that they can easily find the best route to your business’s location.
Join the local online community
And of course, you shouldn’t forget about the power of Off-Page SEO. An effective way to do this is through acquiring backlinks to your website, so create a plan for local link building and aim to get 5-10 backlinks from local websites with different DAs; from directories, related areas websites, reviews and forums, and have these link back to the most relevant location page on your site.
Following these steps will result in improved local SEO of your websites or your customer sites. If you’re struggling to get your local optimisations right, it may be advisable to work with an agency
