Top 4 Ways to Improve Local SEO

large__7460434194If you’re a small business working on your marketing campaign, you may have heard the term “local SEO.” Local SEO differs from national SEO because it specifically targets a local audience. For example, if you’re selling shoes in Indianapolis, you want to ensure that your local Indianapolis audience comes across your business when searching for a shoe store. Through local SEO, small businesses can increase their customer base and better reach their local audience. While there are many ways to improve local SEO, here are our top four tips.

1. Claim Your Place

The first step in your local SEO campaign should be claiming your company’s place on various local search directories and social media networks. First, claim your Google+ Local listing. This should be completely filled out with your contact info, business name, description, images, videos, and other content. Next, claim your spot on other local directories, listings, and review sites such as Yelp. Positive reviews will strongly benefit your local SEO campaign.

Last but not least, claim all of your social profiles. You should have an updated and active profile on all of the major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  You may also want to use Pinterest and Instagram. Foursquare is also key as a location-based social network.

2. Optimize Your Website

When optimizing your website for local SEO, you’ll want to use geographic keywords (city and state) in a few key areas. First, use keywords in your page title, title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, content, headers, and internal links. You should also focus on long-tail keyword variations, which refers to the different ways that customers might refer to your location during search. Finally, ensure that your contact information appears in the same format on all pages of your website, ideally in the footer.

3. Publish Content

While content is key for all SEO, it particularly benefits local SEO because you can target geographic keywords. Your blogs and articles can talk about company and industry news, case studies, stories of customer success, and other relevant information that can use target keywords, both for your location and industry. Another benefit of content is the fact that it keeps your website regularly updated, which improves rankings in search.

4. Go Mobile

Finally, mobile optimization is also important for small businesses working on their local SEO campaign. This is because more often than not, when people use a mobile device for a search, it’s because they’re looking for a local business for a specific product or service. Many will use their mobile device to find your contact information, look up directions to your business, or find reviews. This means that your website must be optimized for mobile devices.

Get in touch with us today at SteerPoint for your SEO needs.