A Complete Guide to Local SEO in 2020

Today we are going to talk about Local SEO, as we all know that it is important and very powerful for small businesses and startups, if your website is not optimized for local search then you are missing almost 80% of your potential customers. 

To help you through the local search, I am going to provide some tips and free tools to optimize your website for 2020. Optimizing your local searches means more website traffic, leads, and conversions since the strategy is more relevant to your base of local customers. According to a research, 35% of all search traffic is local. 

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO helps businesses promote their products and services to local potential customers. To gather information for local search, search engines use local content, social profile pages, links, and citations to provide the most relevant local results to the user.

Local SEO Tips

1. Create and optimize your Google My Business Profile: Google My Business has become the best of the best for local searches. It is a free tool by Google to help your business meet Google's needs. To ensure that you're optimized for Google My Business, you need to create and verify Google My Business page, use regular posting on it, ask for the reviews from your client. For a complete guide to Google My Business, do read out our last blog here (https://community.profshinetech.com/blog/googlemybusinesslistingbenefitsandchecklist).
2. Optimize URL, title tags, headers, meta description, and content: Optimize your URL, title tags, headers, meta description, content by finding high volume keywords, use free tool Ubersuggest to find keywords for your website, analyze your competitor's website. Create new content for your website and fully customized, write new blogs, because each time you write a blog new indexed page, keywords, title, URL has been added to your website, and also a new opportunity to get found in search engine result pages (SERP).
3. Optimize for Voice Search: Voice search will grow rapidly in the coming years. Therefore, in local SEO, it's essential to optimize how people ask questions when they speak into as opposed to how they type out their searches. While using voice search customers use long-tail keywords as compared to regular searches. So, the content of the website should be customized according to the conversational tone of someone speaking. It is very crucial to do that because while using voice search, a customer is looking for specific information.
4. Create Content for Local News, Events or Stories, etc: Sometimes there is nothing more beneficial then speak and write about the local stories, events, news, or issue to grab the attention of your local customer. It can be done by creating blogs, events, posts, sharing the news in the local areas. For Ex. If you are a local real estate business owner, then you can create different pages, one for each of your locations, where you can feature local content around news events or changes in the local real estate market.
5. Mobile-Friendly Website: According to research it is found that 9 out of 10 users make searches on their smartphones now. To be a player in the local search market your website must be friendly with all the devices.
6. Hone in on Local Keywords: Use the keywords which are relevant to your local potential customers. Use Google Keyword Planner a free tool to filter your keyword research according to your location. This lets you create a list of locally relevant keywords to target. After searching the right keywords, add them to your URL, content, meta title and description, headers, etc.
7. Add location pages: Location pages are a must on your website if you are serving more than 1 location in your area. The location page should include name, address, phone number, business hours, description of the company, etc. For single-location businesses, create a locally descriptive About Us page. You'll get big-time bonus points if you add a Google Map to your website on your respective location page or contact us page.
8. Optimize Business Directories and Citations: Online business directories not only get your business name, address, and phone number into these directories help visibility, but it'll also boost your local SEO. Your local business directories are like Facebook, Bing, Linkedin company directory, Yelp, Yellow Book, Yahoo, and many more.
9. Focus on High-Quality Backlinks: Backlinks are the most important factors for the local search engine results. Backlinks are the links that point to your website from different websites, directories, etc. It's essential to get links to boost your local SEO, but their quality is also important. Create high-quality backlinks by writing impressive content so that the others want to link to your content, do guest blogging on the websites who have high domain authority, engage with local influencers/bloggers, etc on social media, email to link back to your content.
10. Social Media Engagement: Google considers content shared on social media more important now than ever before. So, just focus and update regularly on social media with your audience, share news, events, offers, blogs, etc on your social media company pages. Today people are more active on social media, it is an important free tool to interact with potential customers.

SEO changes very rapidly if you can see Google itself change its algorithms very soon, you never know when Google will change their algorithms and will introduce new features on it's SERP's for local searches, but by implementing these 10 powerful tips you can ensure that your business will not lack behind by taking the advantage when the new features of Google will be launched. For more Free SEO Tools.