10 Steps to Improving Your Local SEO Rankings

10 Steps to Improving Your Local SEO Rankings

It seems like the local SEO trend has blown over a lot now and not many people are still talking about the importance of improving your local SEO. And in the last few years where it's become so increasingly important to improve your local SEO for those webmasters that so heavily rely on it! Such websites would be those that cater to and sell products and or services that are local to the buyer. This could be something from a local plumbing company, to a local SEO service as well. Since people also search for SEO services and companies by country and area too. Example "SEO services New York" or "SEO services Canada Toronto" or even "SEO services London" or "SEO services London Enfield" etc etc.

And improving your local SEO (how you rank from an on-page ranking perspective) doesn't and isn't hard to do! But knowing about the things you can do and how to do them makes all the difference! And so, here's 10 steps to improving your local SEO rankings in the Search Engines today. Steps that come in the form of tips, tips you can apply to your website or business model to literally get your business and website on the map!

Step 1. Localize your Logo
All the images on your site like your logo especially, should all be using image alt tags. These can be put to good use by using your business names and even local trading areas in the actual file names. For example "bills-seo-services-london-logo.jpg" for the file name and "Bill's SEO Services London Logo" for the actual images name. Likewise, the EXIF data that is saved in images such as the details in the property settings of images like logos and can also be localized (optimized for local SEO) by filling these in with the area you're targeting. Search Engines can see and read this EXIF data just like you can.

Step 2. Localize your Meta Title + Description
The Meta Titles and Description are about the 1st thing that Google looks at next to the Title itself as a way to know what that page is about. And if you're targeting a certain area of the world, you should include that city and the region in the meta titles and descriptions. This much is just basically obvious! But a lot of people overlook it. Examples would be a Meta Title that was something like one of the above title ideas and a description that asked a question like "Looking for SEO services in West Sussex, Sidlesham? We are an...". That way anyone looking for that, in that area would see it. No brainer!

Step 3. Add a Directions Map
Adding a Google Map to your site is one way you can show where you are located visually, on a map. On one of those Google Maps which you can set the location of your premises or business of with a marker on the map and then easily embed that onto your site. This might be best kept to your About Us and/or Contact Us pages but can equally be used as effectively on your homepage too!

Step 4. Website NAP's
This should really come in about 2nd place on the most important of all steps to take. But the NAP (Name, Address and Local Phone Number) should be displayed on your site in a prominent place. Usually above the fold in the header somewhere, usually on the right side, or in the footer of your site at the least. Your NAP's should ALWAYS go on your Contact Us page. The good thing about your NAP's is not only does it let people contact you easier, but it can be optimized to the area you wish to target by displaying your actual physical address or trading area.

Step 5. Schema Scheming
If you're website isn't taking advantage of everything that Schema has to offer it when it comes to optimizing your site for local SEO yet then you're website is still living in the dark ages lol. You can check if your site is using Schema and learn more about what it is and how it can help you on schema.org. And why use microdata? Web pages have an underlying meaning that people understand when they read them. But Search Engines like Google have a limited understanding of what is being discussed on those pages. By adding additional tags to the HTML of your web pages—tags that say, "Hey search engine, this information describes this specific movie, or place, or person, or video" you can help search engines and other applications better understand your content and display it in a more useful, more structured and relevant way.

Step 6. Set the Correct Language and Geo Tags
This is a step that gets seriously overlooked and ignored. Since for a lot of webmasters, they don't understand the meaning and implications the Language and Geo Tags have on a websites local rankings. Put basically, en-US and en-GB are NOT the same place and location. Just like de-DE and or de-CH aren't either. Most English speaking sites will be using en-US or en-GB and you should use the one for the country and location that you want to target. Fortunately it's not to hard to change these without screwing up your site in the HTML headers.

Step 7. Google Authorship Rich Snippets
Google Authorship used to be a good way to improve your local SEO ranking and click through rates if your business was well known locally. but Authorship markup is no longer used by Search Engines for that reason since so many people took advantage of abused it lol. What's better now is to use Rich Snippets instead. Structured data markup is used in Schema but can be used to improve your local SEO rankings greatly if you have a lot of pages or blog posts for example on many different things related to the area you're targeting since you can fill it with local area, town, city keywords etc.

Step 8. Website Content and Links
Of course, your actual website or blogs content plays a large role in your local SEO rankings. And by making sure that your content contains the names of the cities, towns, regions, areas or countries that you want to target will help it to rank higher for it. And you can use your content to write about local business, events, places etc that are relevant to that area or the people that live there. And linking out to other local authority sites can help too despite what's said about that!

Step 9. Highlight Your Team Players
This is another step that gets overlooked and under used and hardly considered much. But your business's team members can help you to improve your local SEO rankings by highlighting them on your website with Schema markup. You can put the area they live in, town, city etc, and link to their Google+ or LinkedIn profiles etc too which can further reinforce your local authority and trust too. Some of them might not live in that town/area but another and having the words for those areas on your site can help you to rank for those other areas, towns, cities too get it?

Step 10. Go Truly Local
You can generate social media coverage and even press interest and coverage by organizing local events without your local area and community. You could advertise these and generate a buzz around them just on your website alone and on your social media profiles as well. And the longer you do, the more people will know about it, the more people will turn up to those events. Then you can create videos for them on the day, take interviews and put all this on your site again as new content which can further improve and solidify your local rankings and trust and authority as a local business.

Conclusion
Like I said from the start, improving your local SEO rankings doesn't have to be hard. It requires two things. Knowing about what they are and knowing how to do them. Fortunately, doing them isn't that hard either so there's no reason to not take advantage of these things for that reason. Hey, that's just smart SEO!

A Free Gift!
And I wanted to leave you with something else as well. Something I've used in the past and do now as a kind of "Local SEO Roadmap". It's actually another step by step guide to Local SEO by the Pickaweb guys and it's more a sort of visual representation of the steps to take where you start with your site and are asked if you are on page 1 of Google. You pick either yes or no and then answer another question and then move on to something else depending on what you chose. Basically, there's nothin' basic about it! It's quite comprehensive and very well made and can be fun to get stuck into on those rainy days or just when you want to improve your local SEO rankings with in a fun, easy to follow, visually pleasing way!

Hope you'll like it and find it useful to you. I'll attach it here.

The Pickaweb Step by Step Local SEO Roadmap
You can thank me later!

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Mike.