Published Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2019, 8:42 am
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As we come close to the beginning of 2020 there is one aspect of SEO that is going to become even more important and that is local SEO. It’s really important for any brick and mortar shop or a business that only services certain areas to be able to rank for those areas. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel or hire an SEO agency that offers local SEO services to crush it at local SEO. Here are some of the top tips on how to do just that.
Let’s dive in.
1. Title Tags
Make sure to optimize all of your title tags for local SEO. The title tag is the text that appears on the top of your search engine results. This is the most visible place when the users are searching. Put all of the cities or regions that you service or want to rank for into your page title tags.
2. Create Location-Based URLs
Have you noticed those footers of companies that list the cities that they serve? Those are businesses that are trying to rank well on local searches. The best way to do that is to create separate pages for each of the locations or regions that you want to rank for and reflect that in the URLs.
An easy way to do that is just to add the city or region at the end of each URL. This is a great way to keep all of your keywords and to improve your local SEO.
For example – domain.com/local-seo-services/london
3. Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are the next most visible element of your search result after title tags. That’s the paragraph under the title and the URL of the search result. Users definitely look at this page for clues on how your content would be relevant to them so it’s really important to add the locations you want to rank for in your meta descriptions.
4. Mobile Responsive Pages
More than half of the internet’s sessions happen on mobile devices and most likely when someone is in a jam and needs something fixed or done locally they use their phone to look it up. So it’s really important that your site is optimized for the mobile experience. There are several ways to do that but the easiest way is to just make sure that your site is responsive and that the design changes based on the size of the user’s screen size.
5. Google My Business
Google My Business is a really important tool to rank locally. You need to set up your profile fully to make sure that your business shows up in the map results. There are so many businesses out there that don’t have their site linked to their Google profile which means that even if users are finding them they can’t click through and get any info about them. That’s a huge opportunity lost right there so make sure to complete your set up and test that your business shows up properly.
Recap
If your business services specific locations – cities or regions – you need to optimize your site to rank well on local search results. Here are the top 5 tips to crush your competition:
- Insert locations into your title tags
- Create location-based URLs
- Optimize your meta descriptions
- Make sure that your site is responsive
- Create a Google My Business profile