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What should you focus on if you want your new site to rank well for local search?
Ilya Nasedkin • 4 December 2018
Local search is more important than ever and if you want your business website – or your local bricks and mortar location – to attract more traffic and make more sales, you need to pull together a local SEO strategy.Although local search is easier to rank for than the main search results (because there tends to be less competition) it is still highly sought after search engine real estate so you’ll need to have a concrete plan in place to get in front of local customers.
1.Understand relevance, prominence and proximityThese three things are central to achieving local search rankings so you should make sure you have a solid understanding of each.Relevance: This is where Google will look at your site and decide how relevant you are for a given search term. The language you use on your site and on your Google My Business listing (more on that later) is key here as you’ll need to sprinkle keywords that describe your industry, products and services across your site, in links and on your Google profile.Prominence: This is how prolific you are on line – so here you need to focus on building a buzz. Send out press releases, get links back from lots of other (relevant and good quality) websites, have people talking about you on social media, work with bloggers to get influencer mentions, try to get listed on conference websites and build local citations. All of these make your brand more visible online.Proximity: Here, Google is looking to see how close your location is to the search user. Local search is all about ‘near me’ so use your address including post code wherever possible. Gather reviews that include your town or city in the text where possible and ensure you have your Google My Business profile information filled out.2.Use Google My BusinessAccording to the annual Moz local ranking factors study, Google My Business signals are up by 32%. This means that if you want local visibility, you need to be switched on to Google My Business. Focus on filling out your profile completely, select the appropriate category, add Posts often, upload images and videos.3.RankingsRankings, especially from Google My Business, are also very important to local search. Research by BrightLocal determined that local businesses have an average of 39 Google reviews but those that appear in positions 1-3 in the local ranking pack have 47 reviews.The number of reviews you have is important, so you’ll need to focus on building those regularly but the speed of response is also important so make sure you allow time to acknowledge each review left.4.Local linksLinks are also important for local SEO so this should be a focus too but, to get your local business website design appearing higher for consumers close to your business, focus on links from other local sites. Those could be partners, trade bodies, local networking clubs or local media.
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