Introduction

Whether you run a small business, or you work for a multinational business that needs to improve its presence locally, local seo is mighty useful.

Now, we know that if you’re thinking about implementing SEO yourself, your probably looking for an easy how to guide. However, local seo is anything but easy normally.

The reason being is for most businesses they now face fierce competition. So, in a nutshell if you want to rank on the first page of Google you seo has to be blooming good.

So, here’s seven steps to improve your local seo:

#1 Obtain your Google My Business account

 

You can’t get your business to rank in the GMB listings, unless your business has a Google My Business account.

So, you either have to claim your listing, or you have to sign-up, either way it’s an absolute piece of cake.

Here’s the link to the page where you can obtain your Google My Business account.

 

#2 Obtain genuine reviews

So, you’ve been sent your pin code through the post, and now your GMB account is up and running.

Now is the time to ask those customers you have praised your company in the past, to get them to leave you a positive business review.

And here’s a really important piece of advice, don’t be tempted to write the customer reviews yourself.

There are two reasons for this, and they are fake reviews are sometimes obvious, and will put a potential customer off.

The second reason is Google’s algorithm is very clever, it will detect your cheating and your Google My Business listing will not be any use at all.

Your probably now thinking, what do we mean by no use at all? Well that’s an easy one to answer, Google has a very sophisticated algorithm, and if you try and trick it will mean that your website could be penalised.

Now in this example, we are talking about GMB and why not to leave fake business reviews. The reason is that say you run a pet shop, and you can see that when you search “local pet shops” all your competitors show up.

But your business doesn’t, well this is because you may have written fake business reviews, so in a nutshell Google has decided not to show your business, but your rival businesses instead.

So, don’t fake your businesses reviews.

 

#3 Use structured data

Sounds complicated doesn’t it? Well it can be, but basically your business should use Schema, and this should be used to mark-up important parts of your website, such as the businesses name, address and also its phone number.

With this part, we would recommend you contact an SEO agency for help.

 

#4 Get typing

As any quality focused digital marketing agency will be able to testify, quality content marketing is important.

In matter of fact, quality content marketing should be what propels your website forward. Yet, a word to the wise, we can not stress the absolute importance that the quality is high.

Plus, if you get the content marketing wrong, well there’s loads of algorithmic penalties that will penalise your website.

Which means if the quality is wrong, and you use rubbish seo, well your website will drop in terms of where it ranks.

So, our best advise is partner with a white hat agency, at least to obtain some advice on how to implement good quality SEO.

 

#5 Technical SEO

When you obtained your brand new website back from the website designers it might have been impressive.

You might have thanked the design agency for doing a brilliant job. Yet, with that said, when you start to have a look at most new websites from an SEO perspective, well its safe to say often they lack the basics.

Often the term “SEO included” is sometimes used by some website design agencies, but this sometimes only extends to a few titles being made, and perhaps a few meta descriptions.

Which is all pretty basic. Instead your seo company should go through your website, and optimise the following in a white hat way:

 

·        H1 to H6 tags

·        Meta titles and Meta descriptions

·        Insure that the website is not “content thin” and sufficient descriptions are used

·        Ensure content marketing is of good quality

·        Ensure that internal backlinks are used

·        Ensure that backlinks have anchor text

·        Make sure inbound links are of a good quality

·        And so much more

 

#6 Business citations

Make sure that your businesses NAP information is written business citations.

NAP stands for name of your business, its address and phone number.

Make sure that your businesses citations are consistent with what is mentioned on your website.

 

#7 Make sure that you refresh your knowledge on regular basis

You have some seo agencies that simply do get a bit stale. That’s to say they know seo methods that worked 10 years back, so they stick to those, and don’t adapt to what is the current best way of implementing seo.

Needless to say these seo agencies often go bankrupt. But if you do implement seo yourself, you do have to keep your knowledge up to date, and this hasn’t even got to cost you a penny, the reason being is there are good seo resources like MOZ that offer advice for absolutely free.