What Are the Key Local SEO Trends for the Year 2021?

by | Published on Apr 20, 2021 | Local SEO

Local SEO means targeting searches which primarily come from any specific geographical area surrounding the place where your medical business is located. It focuses on optimizing your website content for search terms like your city name, your specialization etc. If you are a baker located in New York, then your website will pop up when a user searches for “Bakers in New York”. This helps you to attract local prospects and customers in your locality. To get information for local search, search engines rely on signals such as local content, social profile pages, links, and citations to provide the most relevant local results to the user. So, local SEO means optimizing a website to increase leads, traffic and overall brand awareness that it would gain from a local search. So, reach out to local SEO services NYC that can help customers find the local business.

According to PR Newswire, studies have shown that 70 percent of small businesses do not focus on local SEO. But it is important for small businesses to realize that local SEO can help with acquiring a competitive edge to win over customers and clients. And with Local SEO you’ll be taking steps to optimizing a website to improve leads and traffic, while increasing brand awareness from a local search standpoint. But as local SEO opportunities continue to grow, competition for local search traffic becomes difficult. So, if you want your business to be successful, your website must be optimized for local search.

Let’s look at Google’s tools and factors to rank for local searches.

  • The location where the search comes from
  • Keyword (s) used in the search
  • Shares on social media
  • Name, Address & Phone (NAP) information
  • Google Map star ratings
  • Identifying the presence of Google Map listing
  • Number of check-ins at the business location

Now let’s review the following simple to implement techniques to help your website become more locally SEO optimized:

    • Claim Your Google My Business: If you own a physical business location, then the first thing you need is to claim your Google My Business listing. Adding vital information such as phone number, address, working information, and a link to the site in your business profile will really help promote your local business. This will help potential customers find your business easily when they search online.Claiming your business listing and providing the correct location and contact information allows prospects to find your business on search engines easily.
    • Promote Online Reviews: Online reviews are an important element for any business. This is because users greatly rely on online reviews before making any purchase decisions. With every year, the dependency on reviews grows steadily because it is a quick way to see how engaged others are with a brand, how reputable you are and so on.online reviews

      91% of people trust online customer reviews and good reviews can help turn a passive shopper into a lifelong buyer. Some of the best ways to get reviews is by asking the customer face-to-face about your services/products, via email, or asking for a review after a sale offer. Make sure to respond to all reviews, whether good or bad. This shows transparency within your business and may encourage more people to leave reviews.

    • Voice Search Optimization: As voice assistants like Google, Alexa, and Siri continue to improve, it is always advisable to improve your local SEO to help these assistants answer the questions that people may normally ask. Make sure to adjust your keywords so as to maintain a conversational tone.
    • Good Backlinks: Backlinks are essential for local pack results and localized organic results. High-quality links help to generate quality content and this will make others want to link back to your site.

Looking at the photo above for instance you will see some key features to pay attention to.

Knowing the domain rating helps to understand the strength of said domain. As the tip of the icrberg you can get a glimpse into the power of the site. Diving deeper, say into Referring domains, let’s us see how credible their domain rating, domain score, or domain authority is. Knowing the number of domains flowing to a site, lets you know that others may be interested or trust some or all the information put forth on the site.

backlink profile

Looking further into the types of referred domains including the backlinks already attained by your backlink source or competitors will give you more of a definitive answer into the backlinks power and relevancy to your site.

  • Local SEO Audit: Local SEO audit helps to find out what has gone wrong in your website. It also gives greater insight about competitors and the performance of your on-page SEO.seo audit
  • Engage with Potential Customers on Social Media: Engaging with potential customers is essential for improving the growth of your business. Social media is an ideal medium to engage with potential customers. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter help to build both a good relationship with your customers as a well as a steady source for leads and followers.source leads
  • Use Locally-Focused Keywords: Using relevant and locally-focused keywords in your content improves online visibility. Creating content with locally focused keywords will improve local traffic.keywords

 

To get these keywords try the following:

Google keyword planner- here you can look at:

  • the CPC for each keyword,
  • the monthly traffic
  • The competition.

These 3 will give you a better insight to two truths.

1. How competitive it is to rank for a keyword, using the competition column
2. And finally, the CPC column, where you will see how in demand a keyword is just by how much your competitors are willing to spend on a click.

 

  • Develop a Mobile-Friendly Website:As one of the ranking factors and due to mobile devices being used to access ( basically ) everything today, it is important to have a mobile optimized website to drive more traffic to.

    There are tons of mobile friendly site testers out there. Here are 2 free options to use:

    • Mobile-Friendly Test a Google product to Test how easily a visitor can use your page on a mobile device.
    • mobiReady A free tool for developers, designers and marketers to test website performance on mobile devices.
  • Power of Local Directories: Getting noticed through this medium can be difficult but it can be achieved by improving local SEO. There is a wide range of categories in local directories where your business can fit. So, make sure to find the best fit for your business and create an account.Here are 5 Web Directories that have value. Also find the rest of the 23 listed items from Amelia Wilson from SearchEngineJournal

    BOTW ( best of the web)- used by more than 16 million businesses, they boast 40,000 – 60,000 visits per month, with about half of that traffic being U.S.-based.

    Spoke.com– With 1.4 million companies and 5 million people listed on their site you can add a web listing for a business or a person and stand a solid chance of getting noticed.

  • Featured Content: Creating content that includes the latest news and events in your local area helps your website to pop up on the search results page if any local customers search for information around their area.

 

There are always more ways to improve your local rankings but for now, Use the tips above to help you evaluate how optimized you are. Using a Local SEO service company in NYC can help you implement effective local SEO techniques. Thereby assisting you with improving your rankings.

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