On-Page Optimization Tips for Local SEO: When people consider local SEO, they often think about their Google Business Profile, local citations, and backlinks as the primary tactics.
While these methods are undoubtedly helpful in capturing “near me” results, on-page optimization also plays a crucial role in signalling the search engines and influencing your local rankings. By optimizing your on-page SEO, you can improve your rankings in both organic search results and MapPack results.
Below are tips for optimizing your on-page content and enhancing your local search visibility.
Ensure Your NAP is consistent
The term NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number, and it plays a critical role in your local SEO strategy. It’s essential to prominently display these three pieces of information on your website, as they can either make or break your local search visibility. A great place to include your NAP is in the footer, as it will appear on every page.
Linking your NAP to your Google Map can further enhance its visibility. It’s also a good practice to feature your NAP on service area pages and contact pages within the body of the content. Consistency is key when it comes to NAP. It’s crucial to ensure that your business information is the same wherever potential customers find you online and anywhere Google may be using it for comparison to maintaining its accuracy.
By including your NAP information on your website, crawlers and bots can establish a connection between your Google Business Profile, website, and other local citations across the web. When it comes to NAP details, it’s best to focus on the big picture rather than getting lost in minor details such as abbreviations versus spelling out street names. As long as you remain consistent with one format, it doesn’t significantly impact your local search visibility.
Spruce Up Your On-page Content
Your website content provides an excellent opportunity to demonstrate your expertise to both your customers and search engines in your area of service. Be sure to include specific details, such as landmarks and street names, along with the services you offer in the area. Clearly communicate why your services are essential for customers in that particular location.
Creating a seamless user experience for your customers involves using language and terminology that reflects your local area. It’s important to consider how your potential customers would search for your services in their local area. Would they include their city, neighbourhood, or metro area?
By answering these questions, you can determine the appropriate content and keywords to use in your website copy. These keywords can target both combination searches (e.g., “SPA in London”) and GPS-based searches (e.g., “SPA” while in London). This is particularly relevant for “near me” searches, where Google matches the user’s location (via IP or geolocation) with nearby service providers to display relevant search results.
To optimize for these keywords, you can create targeted pages that focus on specific services and their corresponding service areas. For example, let’s consider a SPA offering pedicure services in London and Machester. In addition to a general SPA service page, the SPA may create separate pages for pedicures in London, Middlesex, Uxbridge, and East London. Each of these pages should be tailored and optimized for the specific location.
Remember, these pages may be the landing pages for users searching for location-specific services, so be sure to include compelling and informative content that encourages users to click through to the next page or to take action on your website. Be sure to conduct thorough research on the area you are targeting. Customers who live in that area will be familiar with local jargon and customs, and they will be able to tell if you are not well-versed in the local scene. Therefore, it is important to be authentic and demonstrate a genuine interest in the local community to establish trust and credibility with potential customers.
Do Proper Header Tags Optimization
Using header tags is important for SEO, and if you haven’t already, it’s important to learn the best practices for using them. When you create service pages targeted to specific locations, you have more opportunities to use header tags with local-based keywords and services. Having well-structured header tags helps both site visitors and crawlers understand the page’s content and structure. Ensure that the header tags you use are relevant to the content on the page and do not overdo it with keyword stuffing, which could make it seem unnatural to both your visitors and the search engine crawlers.
Do Proper Internal Linking
Utilize internal linking strategically throughout your website to demonstrate to both your audience and the search engines that you are capable of serving customers in the targeted local area. When adding city names to your on-page content, utilize them as an anchor link to your service area pages.
In addition, you can incorporate widgets, lists, and blocks on top-level pages that include multiple links to your service areas to provide an SEO boost. One way to implement this is by creating a block on your website that highlights the metro areas you serve. This block could include the name of the metro, an image of the area, and a brief description. Each piece of text could then be hyperlinked to the corresponding location page on your site.
Local Business Schema
The local business schema type is a code that includes essential information such as addresses, reviews, hours of operation, social media accounts, service area geo-shapes, and departments that may not necessarily be mentioned in your on-page content.
By using schema, you can provide search engines with a comprehensive understanding of your business, including who you are, what you do, where you do it, and why others trust you, without overloading a single page with too much information. This approach also enables you to have more control over the information you display, rather than relying on search engines to gather details from various sources across the internet.
What are some ways to determine if these optimizations are effective?
After optimizing and preparing everything, it’s essential to measure the impact of your local SEO strategy. Several tools can help you do this, and we’ll briefly examine a few of them.
Geo-Grid Local Ranking Tools
Tools such as Local Falcon and Local Viking use geo-grid technology to monitor map results within a selected area. These tools provide a visual representation of your local rankings and allow you to schedule periodic scans to capture a snapshot of your results. This helps to track the performance of your site on maps over time and keep a history of your local SEO progress.
These scans are useful not only for monitoring your local map rankings, but also for tracking the effectiveness of your content and title tag optimizations based on specific keywords.
Local Search Results Tools
Local search result tools like Local Falcon, Merkle, and BrightLocal allow you to simulate the SERPs of your targeted local area, giving you a more accurate view of your local SEO impact. These tools also offer options to view Google Maps, select device options, and even get as specific as the zip code level.
Google Business Profile Analytics
Getting information directly from the source is always the best approach. When you make optimizations, you should see a boost in your Google Business Profile metrics such as click-throughs to your website, phone calls, or requests for driving directions if successful. As your visibility improves, you should naturally see an uptick in traffic.
When it comes to optimizing for on-page local SEO, it’s important to keep things simple and relevant to your business. If you can provide customers with what they’re looking for in the location they desire, the rest will come naturally. Your job is to ensure that you’re giving them the right information. Despite the rapid changes in local SEO, a solid on-page strategy will always be a winner for both you and your customers. If you want to grow your business by getting more leads and generating sales, you must hire an Enterprise SEO specialist for quick results.
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