Local SEO Strategy & Guide: The Right Way to Reach Local Market

If your business targets a certain location, of course, the main objective is to dominate that location. It can be achieved by implementing local SEO. This optimization strategy is beneficial for small and medium-sized businesses to reach high-quality audiences that really need your product or service.

This article was compiled to help you understand local SEO and how to implement it on your website. Find the definition, methods, tips, and tools needed here.

What Is Local SEO?

Local SEO is a website optimization practice to increase the performance, traffic, leads, and brand awareness of your business from local searches. This search may be done from various search engines, but this strategy focuses on optimization for Google users.

Some strategies that can be done to optimize local presence are doing local keyword research, optimizing business profiles on Google My Business, and building NAPW citations (Name, Address, Phone Number, and Website).

The implementation of this local SEO strategy will make it easier for potential customers to find information related to your business. The complete information you provide has the potential to increase customer trust so that they are willing to make transactions.

Why Is Local SEO Important?

It is important because many people use search engines to find information about local businesses. According to Google data, 76% of consumers perform a local search on their phone before visiting a local business, and 28% of those local searches result in a purchase.

In other words, local potential customers will search for your business before they decide to make a transaction. If they can't find information about your brand online, this can cause potential buyers to lose confidence in your product and reduce conversion rates.

How Google Determines Local Ranking

As in the organic rankings, in determining local rankings Google will also scan its index to provide the best results for user search queries. However, there are several local SEO ranking factors that differentiate ranking results on local and organic searches.

Some of the local SEO ranking factors used by Google are as follow:

• User's location when they are browsing 
• Consistent NAPW (Name, Address, Phone Number, and Website) citation
• Completeness of business profiles, keywords used, to photos that you add on Google My Business
• Customer sentiment and keywords used in online reviews
• Your business rating on Google Maps
• Number of shares on social media
• Ranking factors in organic SEO still affect local rankings

Generally, organic search results are displayed in the form of “10 blue links” sorted from the most relevant to the user's search query.

Meanwhile, local search results are usually packed in the form of a map pack or local pack that displays a list of the top local businesses and a map of their location. Usually, the map pack will be displayed at the top of the Google SERP.

Local SEO Strategy for Business

If you want to win the business competition in a certain location, you need to know the best SEO strategy for your local business. Thus, you can guarantee your business's online presence and make it easier for potential customers to find information about your business.

The strategies that you can do to optimize your local presence are as follows:

Do Local Keyword Research and Competitor Research

One of the goals of implementing local strategies is not only getting local rankings but also being able to get better rankings than competitors. In achieving this, at least you need to do local keyword research and competitor research.

There are several SEO tools such as Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends that can help you choose local keywords. Make sure the keywords you are targeting are relevant to the products or services you offer, including the location you are targeting, define your business, and include terms that potential customers are looking for.

In addition, competitor research is also important. Do a competitive analysis to see which competitor keywords are ranking, where their backlinks come from, and more. You can use SEO tools to do competitor research and view SEO metrics.

That way, you can determine which keywords are the most suitable for your website. If you feel you are unable to do local keyword research, then consulting and using a local SEO service can be the solution.

Perform Site Audit

Before optimizing your website, you need to check which parts of the website need improvement and which are working well.

A site audit is one of the strategies that can help you identify on-page and technical SEO issues. You need to fix these problems before focusing on making SEO articles, improving website performance, doing link building, and more.

Add Location Page on Website

As we know, the purpose of implementing this strategy is to increase your visibility in local searches. Therefore, you also need to add a location page to your website.

This will make it easier for users to see the details of your local business location and make it easier for those who want to visit your company.

Improve Internal Link Structure

Internal links are one of the factors that make it easier for search engines to understand the structure of your site. If possible, you can improve the performance of internal links by adding local keywords in the anchor text.

Create Local Content

Besides producing high-quality content, consistency in creating content is important. Make sure you have included the targeted keywords and locations in your local content. Next, regularly publish local content and measure how it is performing to help you achieve your business goals.

Add Client Reviews

Getting positive reviews from clients and actively interacting by responding to their reviews are quite important strategies. Even Google mentions that quality reviews can help potential customers to see your business information and increase their visit potential.

In addition, when users add reviews that contain certain keywords or locations, Google will also see this as a signal that you have a trusted local business. If you have several products or services on offer, it is highly recommended that users add reviews for each product.

Thus, you can provide more complete information according to user needs.

Make Sure The Website Is Mobile-Friendly

Most internet users search through their mobile devices. Therefore, you need to make sure that your website is optimized for mobile. That way, your website can provide a good user experience for users.

Use the mobile-friendly test tool to ensure that your website can run well on mobile devices. Apart from that, the tool also allows you to identify any problems with your web when running on a mobile device.

In other words, you can use this tool to see if your website is already mobile-friendly or still needs to be optimized for mobile devices.

Active on Social Media and Post-Google My Business

One of the important things in a local SEO strategy is sharing content on social media. If you have complete information about your business on Google My Business, then you need to share it on social media. This will better align social media engagement and search.

Local SEO Optimization Tools

After knowing the local SEO strategy, then we will show you some local SEO tools. Starting from tools to complete business profiles to tools that you can use in conducting local keyword research.

Some of the tools that you can use in local business optimization practices are as follows:

Google My Business (Google Business Profile)

Google My Business is a tool that local business owners can use to provide potential customers with information related to their business.

With this tool, business owners can manage various information ranging from business name, address or business location, operational time, email address, company number, website, company photos, to customer reviews.

Based on the latest Google information, starting June 2022 the mobile GMB app will be transitioned to the Google Maps app so you can manage business information and connect with customers more easily.

Google Ads Keyword Planner

In addition to some of the tools above, you can also take advantage of the Keyword Planner tool from Google Ads. You can use this tool for free to do keyword research by looking at search volume at the local level.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a tool from Google that you can use to see trends in a topic or keyword in a particular location. This tool can be used for free and is equipped with features that support your local keyword research activities.

That's a complete explanation regarding local SEO, ranging from the definition, ranking factors, and how to optimize it for your website. Use those local SEO optimization tools to simplify the business optimization process in local search.

As an in-depth SEO company, cmlabs can help you optimize your business's online presence in both local and global markets. So, you don't have to do all the optimization alone, cmlabs local SEO services can be a fit partner in achieving your SEO goals.