Local SEO is all about increasing the visibility of your local business in search results so that you can attract new customers.

In this guide, we will discuss some of the best tips for taking advantage of local SEO tools and techniques so that you can stand out from your competitors and boost your bottom line.

What is local SEO?

Local SEO is important for local businesses if you want to become more visible online to local customers. According to Google, 45% of searches are for or about local businesses. Regardless of where your business is located or what you sell, it is highly likely you will bring in more customers if you optimize your online presence.

Most local businesses benefit from incorporating local SEO strategies into their marketing, such as hotels, restaurants, bars, doctors, law firms, mechanics, gyms, and hairdressers.

Here are some of the main reasons why local SEO is important:

• It helps your business stand out from your competitors.
• Local SEO helps drive more traffic to your website—some of these visitors will convert into customers.
• Search engines like Google are seeing a rise in the volume of local searches. If you don’t optimize for local search, you’ll miss out on customers.
• Local SEO is important for maintaining your business’s reputation online (for example, on review sites).

Now that we’ve established local SEO is important, let’s discuss 4 ways you can maximize your local SEO efforts.

1. Set up Google My Business

The best place to start is to ensure that you set up a “Google My Business” account. Google My Business is a free tool offered by Google for businesses to manage their online presence across the whole group of Google products such as Google Maps and Google Search.

Once you’ve set up your account, you can control all of the information that is in your Google listing so that when customers search for your business, they will be given accurate information about it. For example, customers can see your opening hours, your contact information, your address (displayed on Google Maps), and read reviews about your business.

To get the most out of your Google listing, you can do many things to optimize it, including:

• Once you’ve created your Google My Business account, make sure that you verify ownership of your business.
• Make sure that all of your business information like opening hours is updated when it changes.
• Add your logo to your profile and some high-quality pictures.
• Make sure you include information like the accepted payment methods, information about your products and services, your address, contact numbers, and opening hours.
• If you have special announcements to make, like upcoming events and sales, you can publish posts with information about them to your profile.
• Ask customers to leave reviews on your profile, and when they do, make sure you respond (to both positive and negative ones). This is important because a lot of prospective customers will read them.

2. Get regular reviews

The next tip to boost your local SEO is to encourage your customers to leave reviews of your business. When customers leave a review, they let other customers know about their experience with your business. If you offer a great product or service, you should receive mainly positive reviews, but you will likely get the occasional negative review. 

It’s important to reply to both positive and negative reviews as it is highly likely that prospective customers will read them and so if they can see that you’ve been responsive to customer reviews this will make them more likely to buy from you.

There are many local business review websites online, including Google Reviews (which show up in search results as part of your profile) and others like Yelp and Zomato. The best review service to focus on is Google Reviews since they will show up in search results, and most of the time, people use their real names to leave reviews, making them appear more authentic.

Here’s how to encourage your customers to leave reviews:

• The number one tip is to ask your customers to leave reviews. Most people won’t even think about leaving a review, so you need to let them know that they have the option of doing so and that you will appreciate it if they do.
• Put up a poster in-store letting customers know that you are on review websites and encourage them to give feedback on their experience at your business. You can include a QR code in the poster to make it easier.
• If you have the customer’s email address or mobile number, send them a message asking if they would like to leave a review (include a link to the review website).

3. Optimize for on-page SEO

On-page SEO (sometimes called on-site SEO) is a series of techniques to optimize your website pages so that you improve their search engine rankings and drive more traffic to your website.

To ensure you are competing as well as you can with your competitors, on-page SEO is really important—because you can be sure most of your competitors will be doing it too.

Here are some tips for optimizing your on-page SEO, most of which you can do yourself, or if you prefer, you can hire a local marketing agency to help you.

• Make sure that you integrate relevant keywords into your page copy. There are plenty of free tools to help you perform keyword research.
• Make sure that you optimize your title tag, meta description, URLs, and images.
• If you publish content like blog posts, make sure that they help customers solve problems or answer questions.
• Make sure that you use internal links on your website pages.
• Ensure that your website is optimized for speed and usability.

4. Build backlinks

The final tip for improving local SEO is ensuring that your website has backlinks. Backlinks are links on other websites that link to your website. Search engines like Google take these links as an endorsement of the content on your website and will rank those pages higher.

It’s important to remember that not all backlinks are treated the same. You need to aim to get quality backlinks from high-quality websites, such as review websites, social media platforms, local blogs, and directory websites, etc.

Here are some good tips on getting high-quality backlinks:

• Focus on producing high-quality content on your website or blog that readers will want to share and link to.
• If you can, offer to do guest posts or articles for high-ranking websites and blogs. They will let you include a backlink in your post.
• Reach out to local influencers and bloggers and ask them to link back to you or offer them the chance to sample your products in return for a published review with a backlink.

The bottom line

Local SEO is a cost-effective way to boost your sales by reaching local customers who are searching for the products and/or services that you sell.

The best ways to boost your local SEO efforts are to set up Google My Business, ask your customers to leave reviews, optimize your website pages for SEO, and try to get high-quality backlinks to your website.

Thankfully, all of these techniques are easy to do and cost little to no money!