Local SEO: A Comprehensive Guide to Local Search

Fact: 3.5 Billion i.e. 46% searches in a day of all Google searches are LOCAL, yet 56% of local retailers haven' t even claimed their Google My Business listing. If you' re not gaining visibility and customers from local search, then we need to solve that problem right now with my power-packed Local SEO tutorial. So, I've got complete tutorial for you on how to do local SEO. Even if you're just starting out, this article should simplify the process and help you gain visibility in local searches.

Let's dive right in.

So first, what is Local SEO?

It's the process of optimizing your online presence to attract more business from relevant local searches. For example, if I type in best digital marketing courses Vashi, we can see that the top of the search results are dominated by a box of local listings on Google Maps, which is called the "Snack Pack".

And below that are your typical organic search results. It's super important that you can gain position in the "Snack Pack" because they generate 33% of clicks on the search results page. But it's equally important to rank in the organic search results since they attract 40% of clicks. So bottom line? It pays to rank in both spots, which is where Local SEO comes in. Now, Google has an estimated 98% market share, in the India, which means that most people are using Google to search for local businesses. So in this tutorial, we'll be focusing on local SEO in Google only.

Now, let's get on the same page and draw out an example scenario. Let's say that I'm opening up a new digital marketing coaching institute in Kamothe (Navi Mumbai) for people like students and entrepreneurs. To differentiate my institute from others and build some nice recurring revenue, we'll be offering study services for a set monthly fee, which includes a library, and access to our premium like-minded WhatApp groups where you can solve your doubts etc. I've invested in this concept, I've dropped a lot of coin, but no one knows about my business because they're finding other institutes like this on Google search.

Alright, so we're going to start with step zero, and it's something all local businesses need to do. And that's to ensure your website is optimized for mobile. According to Bright Local's study, 61% of mobile users are more likely to contact a local business if they have a mobile site. You can use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool (https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly). Just enter in your domain or URL and shortly after, Google will tell you whether your page is mobile friendly, or if it's not.

On to step 1, and that's to claim and optimize your Google My Business listing. This is arguably the most important part of Local SEO. And it's actually quite easy to do. Just go to (https://www.google.com/intl/en_in/business/), sign into your Google account, and the first thing you'll need to do is enter in your NAP, which stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. If you have a business with multiple locations or you purchased a franchise, then you can start typing in the business name, and you'll see a list of businesses that are already registered in Google's database. My institute is called High Online Traffic, so that's all I'll write and click next. It's important to note that your business name is not meant for keyword stuffing. So I wouldn't write something like "Digital Marketing Coaching Center Kamothe Premium Services - High Online Traffic". It's not going to help you rank, so don't bother. Next, we'll enter in our address. Now, since we' re a coaching institute, we'll obviously have a physical location, but if you're an independent service provider like a photographer or a work-from-home consultant then your typical client meetings might happen in their office, or in a coffee shop. If that's the case, then you can enter in your home address, select the "I deliver goods and services to my customers," then choose to hide your address since it's not a store. Now, when your business shows up in Google search, it'll just show the city and province/state where you work from.

Let's move on to the next step, which is to pin the marker on the map. Google's pretty good with this, but you'll want to examine the map and make sure it's in the exact position where your store is located. Just drag and drop it and click next when you're done. As Google recommends, don't add multiple categories to list all of your products and services. Instead, you should focus on this statement: "My business is a blank." Rather than "My business has blank." So in the case of High Online Traffic, our business is a coaching institute. Just start typing in a description and select the most appropriate one from the drop-down.

Let's go to the next step, which is to enter in your phone number and website, which is pretty straightforward. This step is optional, but I recommend including both. Now, we'll need to finish off the process and verify the website, which can be done by phone or mail. You just need to follow the instructions from Google and your My Business listing should be active in no time. Before you continue, you should add a few more optimizations to your listing.?You can click on the info menu in the sidebar. Then you can click on the pen icon to edit different parts of your listing. So you can add more relevant categories, for example. Other things you should do is to set your hours of operation, add specific URLs to important pages, add a description of your business, and photos of your actual location.

Now that we have the foundation set up for local SEO, let's move onto step 2, which is to do some keyword research. There are some obvious terms you'd want to rank for like "digital marketing institute near me", "high online traffic", "what time does high online traffic open or close", and "high online traffic phone number". With these kinds of local search queries, Google pulls the information from the Google My Business listing. For example, if I type in "what time does Starbucks close", Google will pull up the Starbucks in my vicinity and show the hours of operations for all locations on the map. And if I specify a location or use a single location business, then you'll see a quick answer box like this, which is pulled directly from Google My Business. So rather than going deeper into the "Snack Pack," or Google Maps listings we'll be talking about keyword research for the organic search results.

First, we need to brainstorm your SILs, which stands for "Service in Locations". As a coaching institute, I'd want to rank for queries like these: "digital marketing coaching institute in kamothe", "performance marketing coaching in kamothe", "local seo institute in kamothe" etc. And we'd want to rank for synonymous variations like "marketing institutes in kamothe". Here are a few ways you can generate solid keyword ideas.?First is to use Google's autocomplete. Just type in the main query you want to rank for, and you'll see a few good suggestions. So I can search in the services category and use a seed keyword like "photographer", and you'll see some cool ideas here like "experienced", "freelance", "engagement shoot" and more. In my opinion, Google auto-suggestion is the absolute best place is to find the keywords that your competitors are already ranking for. And the reason why this is so effective is because this is basically telling you which keywords that you can also rank for.

You should have a solid list of keyword ideas now, so it's time to move onto some on-page SEO. If you're familiar with SEO, then you'll find that a lot of the typical on-page SEO best practices apply here. For example, it can be advantageous to include your keyword in your H1 tag, add your target keyword in the title tag, set the URL slug to your keyword, and use short URLs. But there are a few other things you should specifically do for local SEO.?Now, these optimizations will vary depending on if you have a single location versus multiple locations. So I'll cover both.?

The first thing you'll want to do is optimize your homepage. In general, most single location businesses should optimize their homepage around their primary location. So as a Kamothe based digital marketing institute, I would probably target keywords like "digital marketing institute in kamothe," rather than just digital marketing institute. Here's why: If you look at the organic keywords report for that kamothe digital marketing institute we were looking at before, you'll see that nearly all of their keyword rankings revolve around their homepage. And you can see that they rank in the "Snack Pack" for that keyword phrase. But if I do a search just 20 miles away from Kamothe, you'll see completely different results for the same keyword phrase. So here are a few on-page optimization tips for your homepage.

First, show NAP information, which again is Name, Address and Phone number on the homepage. In fact, you can add this to the footer of your entire website if you operate from a single location. And it's absolutely critical that your name, address, and phone number match exactly or as close as possible to what you've submitted to Google My Business. You can also add testimonials or reviews of your business here and use Schema markup, which we're going to attack right now. Schema markup is code that you add to your website to improve the way search engines read and represent your page in the search engine results. You can use Google's structured data markup helper (https://www.google.co.in/webmasters/markup-helper/) to eliminate a whole mess of complicated coding. Just select a data type, so in this case, we'd choose local businesses, then enter in?the URL of the page you want to markup and click the "start tagging" button. Next, just click on the elements that you want to tag. Then scroll down add a few more markup elements like phone number & address. Once you're done, you can click on Create HTML button, and a piece of code will come up which you can add to your website.

Now, if you're a business that has multiple locations, then you're exempt from the rule of optimizing your homepage around your primary location. And by multiple locations, I'm not referring to a couple brick and mortar shops 10 miles from each other, but bigger companies like hotels, car rentals, packers and movers where they might have hundreds or even thousands of locations. Instead of the home page, you would want to optimize local landing pages by including key elements like the location's NAP, operating hours and sprinkle in related keywords targeted at that location. For an example, if you want to rent a car in the Mumbai, then you'll start at their location directory where you need to select a state where you want to rent a car. Next, you'll need to pick a city within that state. Then you'll be brought down to the branch level. Finally, you'll see the local NAP information that's actually designed to convert visitors into customers. Scrolling down, you'll see the operating hours for this specific location. And if we look at the organic traffic for these 4 pages, you'll see that they all get?a good amount of targeted search traffic on landing pages, which I'm sure is quite profitable.

The next step is to build local Citations. And citations are online mentions of your business. There are two main types of citations. They are structured and unstructured. Structured citations are mentions that include your NAP information and it's usually presented in a visually-structured manner. So this would include places like business directories and social profiles. Unstructured citations are mentions of your business that don't follow a structure. So this might be in blog posts, preferred vendors pages or on other websites. And building local citations is super important. According to a 2017 study done by Moz, citation signals were one of the top local ranking factors, which was true for both Google's "Snack Pack" results and regular organic search results. And this is likely due to having consistent NAP information from all over the web, which verifies that the data Google has in their My Business listing is accurate. On the other hand, inconsistent NAP information can confuse or mislead both Google and potential customers.

So your job is two fold: First, you need to make sure that your existing citations are correct and consistent. And second, you need to build more relevant citations. So to handle the first part, you need to perform a citation audit. More often than not, some of your citations will be incorrect and/or incomplete. And you can run a quick search using Moz's local search tool. From here, you can see a breakdown of the complete, incomplete, inconsistent, and duplicate citations, which you can then manually fix. After you've completed your audit, you'll want to build more citations. Now, if you're a new business, I would start with a list of core structured citations. The great places to find citation opportunities is to let your competitors do the work for you.?Below is the screenshot.

In general, the more sites a domain links to, the better the chances of it being a legit place to create your own citation. With these citation hunting methods, it should be enough to keep you busy for a while. But we can't stop here because we still need to build quality editorial links. According to Moz's 2017 survey, link signals were the most important ranking factor for local organic results. For the local "Snack Pack," links were the second most important factor. Rather than focusing on a full-out link building tutorial, I want to leave you with two tried?and true tactics that work.

The first is to create and promote a useful resource. In this case, a local resource related to your niche would be ideal. I know I say it all the time, but people are more willing to link to helpful articles over salesy content like product and services pages. So a couple ideas would be to create local "best of" guides or content that would appeal to your target audience. So for example, we could create content on Top 10 Digital Marketing Institutes in Navi Mumbai, where we can plug our own products.

The second tactic would be to guest blog. Even though guest posts normally come with a link back to your site, I want you to look at this as an opportunity to build yourself up as an industry expert. This is particularly important for people in the services industry. People want to hire professionals they can trust and know will do a good job. And often times, they're willing to pay a premium to have the peace of mind that the job's gonna get done right the first time. And you can look for local blogs that accept guest posts by googling any of these queries. So looking at the search results for "Navi Mumbai "write for us", you'll see some very relevant local websites that are seeking writers.

The last and final step is to take care of ongoing activities. Even though you've set up your Google My Business and built a bunch of citations, these are all things that you want to have well-documented. In business, things change. That might be you moving to a new location, changing your phone number, or even changing your business name, in which case, you would need to update all of your citations.

So the first thing you need to do is ensure that you keep your Google My Business account active. There are 3 important regular tasks that you need to take care of.

1. First is to consistently respond to customers and client reviews. This includes both positive and negative comments.
2. Next is to be on the lookout for inaccurate edits to your Google My Business listing. Anyone can click on "suggest an edit" on your My Business listing and sometimes Google will accept these suggestions without notice to you or the business owner. In fact, scammers have even swapped phone numbers with legit businesses for a quick payday. So it's your job to ensure that your listings are up to date and correct at all times.
3. Finally, is to use Google Posts to keep your customers informed and engaged. Google Posts is a micro-blogging platform within Google My Business. And all of these updates are visible in the Knowledge Panel and accessible with the click of a mouse. This provides an opportunity to attract more attention to your listing, connect with your audience and ultimately boost conversions. You can create a Google Post from within Google My Business by going on the posts menu, click "Write your post" and then add an image and up to 300 words of text. This is a great way to share your promotional offers or teasers for your blog posts. You can also choose a call-to-action button from a list of preset options to bump click-throughs. I recommend all local businesses play around with this feature and stay active with Google Posts. It doesn't take any more time than a tweet and there's a ton of potential to garner attention from Google searchers.

Now we've covered a lot here, so what I recommend doing right now is putting these techniques into action & watch the results and then analyze the power of Local SEO.

All the best and Thank you for reading!