7 ingredients of a successful local SEO strategy

Local SEO is a crucial traffic medium for any local business website. After all, as much as 90 percent of consumers search for local businesses online.

To be successful in search, however, you need a robust local SEO strategy. Here are the seven ingredients that a successful local SEO strategy should have.

1. A user-friendly website architecture

You need a solid foundation to build a successful local SEO strategy, and that comes only by building a comprehensive and user-friendly website architecture.

Start by taking a note of all the products and services your local business offers. Also, take a look at what your direct competitors are offering and how they are presenting their products and services. Any overlap that you have with their product lines can give you an idea of what you should do.

When you are shortlisting your products and services for the site architecture, do the following:

• See if you are using the right keywords to describe your products or services.
• Shortlist keywords for mapping.
• Distinguish between primary and secondary services/products.
• Visualize how you want to categorize products and services in the main navigation.

2. Comprehensive competitor analysis

Remember that the goal of a successful local SEO strategy isn’t just to rank your local business website on the search engine results pages. The actual goal is to outrank your competitors on the SERPs, so you can get a bigger share of the organic traffic.

That is why it is crucial to know and understand what your competitors are doing.

Use an SEO tool like SpyFu, Ahrefs, SEMRush, etc., to conduct a detailed competitor analysis. The competitor analysis should tell you everything about your competitors’ websites and organic strategy — from the keywords they are targeting to their most popular pages to how strong their website is in terms of technical SEO.

3. Robust keyword research

We have already briefly talked about keyword research earlier in this article, but this is such a crucial aspect of an effective local SEO strategy that it requires its own section.

No matter how good your SEO plan is, it will fall flat if you do not select the right keywords to target.

In the previous step, you must have identified the keywords your competitors are targeting. By now, you should also know which terms your audience uses to search for your products and services. That gives you a solid foundation to work with.

In addition, we have two more tips:

1. Focus on long-tail keywords as they are easier to rank for and may also yield a better conversion rate.
2. Focus on geo-specific keywords that are relevant to your local business.

4. Localized landing pages

Localized landing pages are the lifeblood of local SEO.

Remember the geo-specific keywords that you identified in the previous step? You can now create dedicated localized landing pages and optimize them for those geo-specific keywords.

This strategy allows you to not only target long-tail keywords but also capture the relevant audience in each city, region, or neighbourhood you are operating in.

5. Consistent NAP information

Determine how you are going to present your NAP information on the website, and then create necessary SOPs, so you stick with that.

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number of your local business. As per Google’s recommended practices, the NAP information should be consistent across the website.

Learn more about NAP and why its consistency is so important.

6. A localized link-building strategy

No SEO strategy is complete without an action plan for building high-quality backlinks. A local SEO strategy is no exception.

However, in the case of a local SEO strategy, you also need a plan to build relevant localized links to the website. Here are a few methods to build localized links:

1. Outreach to local bloggers and news publishers for backlinks
2. Directory submissions
3. Publish guest posts on local blogs and websites that can fetch you backlinks
4. Host local events and get featured in the local news
5. Get listed on your local business chamber website
6. Get featured on local websites owned by your customers

7. Positive customer reviews

Last but not least, focus on a plan to generate lots of positive customer reviews.

The total number of positive reviews your local business has can have a direct impact on the site’s search engine rankings. Therefore, make sure you have a plan in place to generate as many positive reviews as possible across all the different directory platforms.

Promote good customer service, conduct exit interviews, ask customers for feedback, follow up with customers via emails after you’ve delivered your product, and focus on after-sales support. These are just a few of the many tactics you can use to encourage more positive customer reviews.

Improve local SEO for your business website

Want to learn more about local SEO? Check out our free local SEO guide (2022 edition).

If you need more help with optimizing your business website for search, give us a call.