Local SEO helps small companies take on big brands, and large companies reach engaged customers.

Improving your local SEO standing could boost your company revenue by nearly 20% — and it’s not that hard to achieve once you get your local SEO strategy aligned.

Here’s how to nail your local SEO strategy using social proof and tactical optimization.

Recommended reading: 6 Tips for Budgeting a Website Redesign and Retaining or Improving SEO

Ask your customers to review your business

Google wants to give its users the best possible results.

When you ask for a Philly cheesesteak, you need to know it’s going to taste incredible. Your customers trust reviews from their peers as much as their family members, which is why Google uses customer reviews for local SEO rankings.

This is what I got when I searched for Philly cheesesteak:

Philadelphia SEO
Credit: Google

Each of the top options has lots of reviews and ahealthy star rating. For your company to win at local SEO you need good reviewsand a high rating. Asking your customers to leave a review is a perfect way toget more reviews. Don’t believe me? Check these figures:

There are many ways you get your customers to leave a review of your business, such as:

Creating a customer testimonial video is great wayto engage future reviewers. It adds credibility to your existing reviews byputting human faces to them. If you want to give it a try, Vidyard is aplatform designed to make creating videos as simple as possible. I’ve tried itmyself and can tell you it’s quick and simple to use. You can request a demo here.

Optimize your business to target “near me” searches

The average mobile searcher will want the company closest to them. Think about it — how many times have you asked Google for a bar, drug store, or gas station near you? Optimizing for “near me” searches helps your business win those SERPs.

Not convinced? Google Trends proves that the number of people making “near me” searches is steadily increasing overall. You can see for yourself below:

Google Trends

 

Credit: Google Trends

The key to targeting “near me” searches is incorporating your city and state into the various on-page elements that factor into SEO. This includes your:

Thankfully, it should be easy to make thesechanges provided your website runs on a somewhat-modern CMS. WordPress hasbecome an exceptional choice for SEO (particularly with the excellent Yoast SEO plugin available to everyone for free), and of course high-end ecommerce storefrontsoftware such as Shopify’s slick hosted service will be a breeze — good technical SEO ismandatory at that scale. Speak to your web designers or developers if you’re not sure.

All you need to do here is distribute your location keywords smartly and prominently, and you’ll achieve two things at once: making local searchers more likely to choose your site, and making Google more likely to rank you for those searches.

Increase the authority of your website with link building

Authority is one of the most important rankingfactors for local SEO. The more authority your website and pages demonstrate,the higher you’ll rank on Google. You can increase your authority by buildinglinks to quality local blogs and businesses. Not sold? This is what the experts say:

Some of the best ways to build links include:

Building a linkable resource is particularly greattactic, because it gives blogs and businesses a reason to direct their visitorsto your company site. All you need to do is turn existing data into somethingfresh. This can include interviews from your experts, or data you’ve uncoveredfrom a government website. I found some great tips on how to do this at Quicksprout. Read this free article to find out more.

1 in 5 of customers buy an item within 24 hours of making a local search, so why wouldn’t you want a bigger slice of that pie? Remember: you could increase your revenue by almost 20%. Put these local SEO tips into practice, and you’ll be on your way to making more local sales.

This local SEO article was originally posted at Key Medium and was contributed by:

Local SEO Agency in Philadelphia- Content Writer

 

Patrick Foster is lead writer at Ecommerce Tips, an online resource and community where he shares his wealth of ecommerce expertise and know-how. From UX and marketing to entrepreneurship and dropshipping, Ecommerce Tips covers it all. For all the latest, find Patrick on Twitter @myecommercetips.

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