How to optimize your website for local SEO in 2020| local-SEO-guide

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is the application of a set of actions.

on your company website or personal brand, which will position your website for certain searches, in a specific territory, town or city.

Currently, there are more than 300 local SEO positioning factors

in 2020, although it does not have to be necessary to apply them all since the competition in local SEO is always lower than for global SEO.

In this article, we are going to teach you some of the best local seo techniques with which you can beat your competition.

Why is local SEO important?

98% of Internet searches occur through Google.

I imagine that this fact will not have changed your life, and it was more or less intuitive;

But what would you say if you told yourself that

more than 46% of the searches carried out on Google are local searches?

This is why Google, in recent years,is prioritizing local results over global,especially with the famous local search map where all the businesses in the area compete to appear and that monopolizes the entire screen of your Smartphone.

To all this we can also add thethe upward trend of voice searches

;you just have to think about the amount of Alexas and Google home that are being sold.

Do you need more to start getting online clients for your company?

Well here are some facts about local searches:

76% of people who perform a local search visit the store or company in 24H.

28% of local inquiries end in a purchase.

89% of Google users search for a local business at least once a week.

58% search for locally positioned companies once a day.

30% of searches made with a Smartphone are geolocated.

76% of local searches end up turning into phone calls.

How to Improve Local SEO and Get Clients Online

As we have already explained, there are more than 300 positioning factors.

The advantage of local SEO is that the competition to beat is usually less

, and therefore, we will focus on the most important ones.

In local SEO everything adds up, but not with the same force.

Read on to learn a step-by-step local SEO strategy and get quality clients.

Optimize Google My Business

One of the positioning factors, according to Moz, is having a Google my business tab optimized for SEO. For us, it is the factor of web positioning in local SEO that gets more results compared to the time invested

In fact,

some local companies have managed to position themselves on the first page even without a website

, only with the GMB tab and with it we can appear on the famous Google maps SEO map.

It is important to make sure to keep the file as complete as possible:

Name: The name of your company as it appeared on your website and in all your records. You should also know that Google allows you to add emojis to your company name, which will improve the% of clicks they will make on your ad.

Description of your company. Write a description about the services you offer and what makes you better than your competition.

Labels. Include labels about the sector in which you are working. You can include many labels, even from related sectors, whenever you are interested.

Grant google my business permissions to send messages to your mobile, so you can reply to your customers as soon as possible and they can even request a quote from the same file.

Place several images of your company. This includes photos of the interior, exterior, management workers, etc.

Verify the ownership of the company. Google checks the veracity of the data and the location of your company, sending a letter to the address you indicate. It is important that, upon receiving the letter, you enter the verification code in your file, otherwise, Google will not validate your profile. Once your profile has been validated, you can further complete your file with additional fields.

Post to Google my business so that you update the freshness of your file and let google know that you are an active user and pending the activity of your company. You should know that event posts disappear every 7 days. Below I leave you a tool to schedule publications.

Enter calls to action to request a quote or make a call.

Carry Out Strategies to Get Reviews

Reviews have become a determining factor for all companies that want to be welcomed in their city.

Would you go to a restaurant with 50 reviews and only 2 stars rating ?.

The point is that most people don't like to waste their time leaving reviews,and you can have a great and revolutionary product, or be the best in your field giving service, but still you will need to motivate your customers. to leave positive reviews.

Another factor to consider is that there will always be people (or even competitors) who will not be happy with your services and consumers who are angry have more than enough motivation to leave you a bad review.

Positive reviews help you mask negative ones and raise the popularity average of your business, and

Google considers them as a great factor of local positioning

We are going to give you a hand with various strategies to get reviews or reviews:

Ask your employees to leave you a review . If you don't have employees, you can always employ family and friends who appreciate you.

Offer your customers something in return . One of our clients owns a restaurant. We design a small advertising flyer that is delivered to the client along with the account. In this flyer there is a free cocktail of the day promotion in exchange for a review. It is a very good strategy to get authentic reviews.

Organize a raffle. If you have a large network community or a large influx of customers in your business, you can advertise a raffle once a month, in which you will raffle your product or service once a month among all customers who leave a review.

Offer a discount on the next purchase through a review, the customer may not have the intention of returning, but for a discount, you can even get him to do it, and incidentally, a comment for your profile.

Email marketing. You can use Email or WhatsApp, if you have a customer database, to request voluntary reviews or even combine it with one of the previous strategies.

*

Trick:

By accessing this link you can search and copy the location ID of your business.

IF you paste that code at the end of this URL: https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=

you will have a direct access to the box to leave reviews on your profile.

We do not recommend, at all, buy reviews or reviews.

Remember that Google is getting smarter every day and if you want to position a project in the long term and that it is safe, follow its good practices even if the competition plays dirty ... that's another matter.

Normally dedicating a little time and effort you can get a very consistent profile of reviews and comments that supports your brand.

Name, Address, and Telephone (NAP)

It may seem obvious if we talk about showing your name, address, and phone, but the truth is that Google tracks that data.

What we mean is that

Google checks the directories and websites where these fundamental contact details appear to give credibility to your profile as a company.

Make sure that your data appears in the more directories the better, as indicated on your website, and in your Google my business tab, now we will enter more into link building for local SEO.

Optimize your local keywords with a good web architecture

Doing good keyword research in local SEO is the key to building a network of leads and not letting out any of the potential clients that we may have.

Always remember to enter

the main keywords in the home page and assign a specific URL or category for each of the services

we offer, along with the location keyword, for example Orthodontics Almería, Dental Prosthesis Almería, Dental Cleaning Almería, etc.

On the other hand, having a blog is highly recommended in most cases, so that it helps us pull more local long-tail keywords.

To do a good "fishing" of keywords (local keyword research) you can use one or more of these strategies.

Google Word Planner

What better way to get keywords in local seo than to use the all-powerful Google tool.

The truth is that to use this tool you need to have an active advertising campaign (Google Adwords), but with a € 1 campaign we can already start juicing all the keywords we want.

In Google's keyword planner you can filter by local location and set a word filter for your city

.

Also, you can use its function to suggest new keywords.

It is still a good option to start a keyword research

Google search engine tips

Surely when you have done a Google search, a menu with search suggestions has been displayed.

These suggestions are provided by Google by order of consultation of other users.

A trick to get related keywords is to write an asterisk (*) in the query to get derived keywords

Let's see the example with ?plumber Malaga?

You can put the asterisk at the beginning of the sentence and thus get prefix suggestions.

Analyze your competition

You can spy on the keywords your competition is using and get new ideas, accessing local directories where services are offered or your local competition is advertised.

For example, in a thousand ads, there are usually several companies or individuals advertising themselves and short ads are used with the keywords or the main service/product they want to sell.

You can also help yourself with tools like Ahrefs that directly remove the keywords from the websites that your competitors position on the first page of Google.

Another alternative,

if you don't want to pay a large sum for Ahrefs, is

Neil Patel's Ubersuggest

.

With this tool, you can analyze your competition and get keywords.

It has a free function and other more complete functionalities for around € 30, although with the 7-day free trial you will have more than enough time to fill the keyword collection.

Link Building for Local SEO

SEO off page (link building) is another branch in which it is necessary to work on your local web positioning strategy.

Incoming links that are pointing to your website is a relevant positioning factor, especially if they come from authoritative websites in your same sector.

Typically for a large seo project like an eCommerce, link building campaigns are usually quite powerful, with constant capital investment.

Regarding local SEO, it is important to

analyze our competition and the area where we want to focus our SEO

.

It will not be the same to try to position "Almería carpenter" as "Madrid reforms".

For this, it is convenient to analyze the link profile of our direct competition.

As always, our most powerful tool for this task will be Ahrefs, although as an alternative we can go to the first page of Google results (from now on, the SERPs), search for our main keyword + location keyword and spy on the competition and how they are positioning their websites.

Once you know the companies in your area in the top10, you can analyze their link profile with Ubersuggest or MOZ's ?Link Explorer? tool, which allows you to analyze 10 websites a month for free.

The second step is obvious, if it works for our competition, for us too;

so to gradually replicate all your links as much as possible.

On the other hand, our competition has more authority and domain seniority, so we are going to

overcome its link building strategy by obtaining local links

.

For this you can use local and generic directories like:

Yellow Pages

Empresite.eleconomista

milanuncios

yelp

Habitissimo

Bing Places

Meetup

https://Folkd.com

https://vulka.es

Startupxplore, investment and funding for startups

Yasteq

https://granpyme.com

guía de empresas y profesionales de Espa?a

https://yearbookguide.com

https://starofservice.es

Tripadvisor: Consulta opiniones, compara precios y reserva

indizze.com

qdq.com

11870, los mejores sitios de tu ciudad

Doing all of the above can be more than enough to beat your local SEO competition and position your website above them.

If not, you just have to take your local link building strategy to the next level, making a payment

in some local newspapers, on event websites in your city or thematic blogs related to your company;

in the latter case you can write a sponsored post.

Structured data of your local business

The all-powerful Google likes chewing things, so it created structured data and started a fierce battle between all Serps to achieve the rich snippets of position 0.

What is Structured Data?

Structured data is a system to label the code of the content of your website so that both Google and other search engines can quickly and directly understand said content.

For this

Home - schema.org is used

and thus can provide that data into another format and give a quick response to search intent of users.

What information should I enter and how is it done?

Like most webmasters use WordPress, with which you already have plugins and community support that make the process very easy.

One of the plugins that you can use in wordpress is

"All In One Rich Snippets" (free) or "Schema Pro", more complete, but for a fee.

In any you can enter endless structured data.

The essentials are:

Name

Phone

Address

Opening Hours

Main services

Images

To guide you,

you can look at the fields of your Google my business file

and enter the same data as structured, so that you are giving Google more signals of the veracity and authority of your company.

You can also win the 0 position with an image carousel and more prizes that our friend Google offers us for doing things as they ask us.

SEO On-page

Don't forget that

conventional SEO on your website is still effective

.

Factors such as

loading speed, web architecture, internal links distribution, etc., will continue to add to your positioning strategy and push keywords to the top positions of the serps.

On the other hand, if

there are certain local SEO factors to consider that you should consider in your business or company:

Insert the Google Maps map in at least one section of your website or in the footer. Make sure to mark all the locations of your company. It is logical to think that people who do a local search are interested in knowing the location of your company.

Add testimonials. In the home of a local landing, certain factors should appear that give credibility and confidence in the eyes of potential clients. One of them is the testimonials, be sure to add testimonials on your landing page, the more the better. Besides you can use them to add local words of your interest. Keep in mind that the box or format where they are displayed denotes credibility and seriousness.

Use the blog! An article every couple of weeks costs nothing and will help you gain traffic and attack local keywords and long tails. Create local content related to events in your sector or add real value to the needs that your potential customers may have. Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience.

Use photos of the owner and the team. The personal brand sells more than the brand image because people empathize more with people close to them. On your local business website, always remember to have a section with photos of the team in a section such as "know us" or "who we are". Even in the home you can put some because it also generates credibility. Remember that if people are interested in your company and browse your website, you are sending positive signals to Google.

Tools for Local SEO

There are hundreds of SEO tools on the market, many of them free, others freemium (partially free) and some paid (with a free trial period).

In this localized SEO guide we have mentioned some of them and we are sure that

you do not need a large outlay to improve your local SEO,

however, at Josmarketing we have wanted to go further by offering you some more to complement your local SEO strategy.

Free SERP checker - google ranking check. Tool to monitor how your local keywords are and the position of your website in the SERPs

Jepto . It allows you to cross the data from your Google my business file with Data Studio and also generate reports for your clients

Loop. This tool generates questions for your clients and, in case their response indicates satisfaction with your product or service, invites you to leave a review.

My maps. With My Maps you can create custom location maps and share them, it also allows you to leave a link at your location. You can create a map that is "the best restaurants in Valencia" and leave no competition in your area.

Citationbuilderpro. It allows you to spy on the competition, so you can see their citations, in which directories they appear and replicate them.

These are some of the tools with which you can destroy your local competition, surely there are more, so do not hesitate to tell us and we will add them.

The Best Strategy to Attract Potential Clients

So far our local SEO guide that is a guide to position your website step by step and synthesized

The best thing about local SEO is that it is not so exploited and you may be the only fisherman on the beach (or you have the best rod).

Improving your local SEO is one of the best strategies to obtain clients for your business

so, if you apply what is shown in this guide you will be successful in 95% of cases

If you have any questions or want to know how we can help you with your company leave a comment or Contact us! https://growmarketers.com/