Tips for Improving your Local SEO

Hello this is Monica Thomas the  SEO & Search Marketing Manager for medresponsive.com

 This week’s 5 Minute SEO podcast covers “Tips for improving your Local SEO”.

 Local SEO helps customers and new prospects find and view pertinent product, location & services information about local businesses. Businesses need to quickly get in the game by adopting local search strategies and best practices to keep their business visible and to keep pace with their competitors.

 The most important tip to improve your Local SEO is the maintenance and optimization of local directories & social profile sites like Google Business & Yelp.

 The first step in this process is the creation of local citations. The creation and maintenance of local citations is critical for Local SEO. A local citation is any online mention of the name, address, phone number, social media and website of a local business.

 Factors such as the number of citations a business adds, accuracy of the data featured as well as the quality of the platforms they exist on all influence rankings. Incorrect citations can misdirect customers, leading to loss of reputation and revenue. Accurate photos and current information are important on all social profile and directory sites. Adding fresh photos and daily Social Media posts will help you get more visibility on Google Business.

 My next crucial tip is to create a strategy to get more reviews. You may already know that customer reviews can have a dramatic effect on your business in a positive or negative direction. But did you know that customer feedback and reviews can impact your site’s local ranking?

 Make sure you encourage your customers to rate your products and services. Keywords used in your customer reviews can also help in your local SEO rankings. Steer away from black hat, fake reviews as it will negatively affect your business and may get you banned from the search engines.

 A user’s experience (UX) when visiting your site has been said to be a factor that may influence rankings in the search engines. Make sure you are creating a valuable user experience when a user visits your site. Your content needs to be easy to read, relevant, informative and interesting enough for the reader to want to call or continue reading. Add local targeted keywords that include your business location& services to help Google and customers reach you faster.

 More and more people are searching for local options on mobile devices and thus pages built for speed are becoming very important. A new web component framework and website publishing technology called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is becoming very popular. Mobile sites built with AMP implemented are likely to outperform existing mobile pages in terms of speed and could soon and give your site a boost in rankings and traffic. Paying attention to improving your site’s speed will not only improve your user’s experience but will also help your pages get ranked higher.

 Researching and understanding how to optimize your on and off site pages for Local SEO can be a daunting and time-consuming task. The Tech, Web Design and Search Marketing team here at MedResponsive can help you with any of your main and local SEO, web design or internet marketing needs. Please contact us via phone or email with any questions. Have a great day or evening! Thank you for listening!