MASTER THE ART OF LOCAL SEO

E-commerce today is seeing a rise in the number of searchers looking into local businesses.

Master the Art of Local SEO

This is why it’s crucial to master the art of local SEO if you wish your business to gain edge over your competitors.

This will also allow you to be easily located by people, especially in the case of mobile searchers currently in your area of operations. 

But what is local SEO and how does its processes differ from SEO that target rankings globally?

What is Local SEO? Local SEO or local search engine

optimization is the process of optimizing your site so you can gain higher local search rankings.

It  is the optimization process for the local results in various search engines.

This type of search engine optimization is crucial for those with brick and mortar stores or businesses that have a local presence.

Evaluate Current Status

There is an age old question in goal setting that many still end up overlooking and sad to say, has been a common reason for failure.

What do you need so you can go where you want to go? Know where you are now! See the current status of your online presence. Evaluate your current status. Knowing this will guide you to your next step and help you set attainable goals.

Attainable in the sense that you will be able to see current resources that you can utilize.

Have you reached a standard that will allow you to skip some steps?

This is very important so you can focus your attention on steps that matter, those that can actually bring you closer to your goal.

Set Your Goals A lot of businesses getting an SEO

service to help them rank in various search engines think that it can be done overnight. This is far from the truth.

SEO takes time especially with the latest Google Algorithms that focuses on quality content and user experience.

It is important to think about SEO and local SEO as an investment that matures over time and not a quick get rich scheme that may be gone tomorrow.

The next step is to set your goals or targets. What do you really want to achieve in terms of search engine ranking and what’s the timeframe you’re giving yourself to achieve it. Is it 6 months or longer? Then figure out at which position you would like to be in the search results. What keywords are you targeting and among those, define which would become your priorities. It is as well important to determine the type of competition that you have in your industry.

Own the Local Listing  Claim ownership of your listing. This will allow you to control what is being published and prevent competitors from tampering your data, one which usually happens especially in highly competitive niches. You can start with Google then go on to other avenues like Facebook, Foursquare, etc. Having ownership of Google and Facebook local listings will allow you to advance the process in a great way.

Create Relevant Content  "Content is King". Pioneer SEO's say this as if

they are a broken record. This is as true before as it is now.

Creating regular quality content in your website can help boost your site's performance in the search engine results page. Keywords found in relevant content never go wrong.

 It is important to think about your user when you are creating content and not just focus on what search engines want.

If you put your focus on what your customers need, then you will be able to provide solutions to their concerns. This will also help you establish authority in the industry you’re in.

Quality Content

Content has to be relevant with what your website is all about.

It should be helpful and engaging to your customers so they will want to share that content to their friends and family.

When you create quality content and it gets shared by a number of people, you consequently improve your brand awareness and rankings since Google has included social signals in the Algorithms.

Having quality content can help your users appreciate your website better compared to your competitors that only have a corporate page and does not provide good and useful content to its customers.

For more expert advice and insightful tips on this area, you can follow sites such as Copyblogger. 

In terms of local SEO, it is important that you localize your content as well. Always come from a viewpoint of someone in the area that you are in. Speak the language of the locals and you certainly will have the edge.

Generate Reviews

This is where great customer relations come into play. Of course if you have impeccable service to begin with, this is a small problem. However, especially for startup businesses, type of service still undergoes improvements. Customers may see something that can make them rate you with 1 star.The key is to treat customers the way you want to be treated yourself.

Whenever you search for a business especially through your mobile phone, there is usually a certain content that welcomes you upon display of the SERPs. Business reviews. 5 stars, 6/10, Unsatisfactory and the like. Then follows a review of the business. Highly rated reviews tend to be the game changer in a certain business. It is extremely important that you’re able to generate high reviews for your business.

Online Reputation Management Keep in mind that everything you show your

customers, even the smallest gestures, can get to social networking sites within minutes. And information posted online, proven true or not, can easily influence other people’s opinion about your business.

Online reputation management is a complicated process to go through but there is always a way to do this successfully. For one, being able to communicate with customers in a regular basis usually does the trick and has always generated awesome reviews.

Monitor Progress  This is important since this is where the

KPI system that you have set-up in the beginning comes in handy.

Check your progress from time to time and see what have worked so far and what needs improvement. Do this regularly so that you will be able to make adjustments before things get too late to fix.

It is important to address concerns that you encounter for your website to perform at its best and rank high in the search results.

Advanced Strategies  These processes to master local SEO

can be done even by someone who is just beginning to practice this.

You do not need to have an extensive background in order to successfully get the ball rolling in web marketing. These are just basic processes.

As you go through your journey towards your goals, you will be able to discover more advanced strategies that will take your campaign to even greater heights.

Check this Out!

Check out this very helpful article about marketing your local business: Master the Art of Local SEO.

Brought to you by GlobalSEOConsultant.com, one of the leading online marketing companies out there.

For more info and tips, check it out: www.globalseoconsultant.com