One of the key online marketing strategies for 2015 is Local SEO. If you have an online business with a physical presence, your only chance of ranking well locally is to boost your Google My Business page and optimize your online store. That, or run an ad campaign on Google Adwords.
Formerly known as Google Places and now called Google My Business, it helps you, if you have a physical store, boost your local ranking and appear in the top local search results.
Working on Local SEO is increasingly important, as local businesses are capturing more and more organic traffic, especially on mobile devices, where Google My Business dominates the top positions.
Why is Local SEO so important for my physical store?
“Four out of five people use their smartphone to search for local information” (digital marketing agency Fresh Egg)
With such a striking headline, it should be clear that Google has long been showing personalized results tied to geolocation. We must keep in mind that Google keeps striving to improve user experience and search results, which is why working on Local SEO is increasingly important.
Here’s a simple, practical example: imagine you live in Manresa and need to find a restaurant for a family dinner or an important event. Most likely, you’ll grab your smartphone and type into Google: “restaurants in Manresa”.
A large share of the population makes this simple gesture every day, and these searches end up turning into a phone call to the business or some other action that benefits the store.
Tips to improve your local ranking
- Create a Google My Business profile
Google My Business is a service designed to connect businesses directly with customers. It merges the old Google Places and the company’s Google Plus Local page. You should work on the page by posting updates, encouraging social activity and inviting users to leave reviews on your profile.
Google will have very valuable information about your business; that’s the big advantage of telling Google who we are, what we do and, above all, where we are. This translates into a higher chance of appearing in search results.
- Start a blog
It’s a good way to attract traffic through keywords that can also relate to the area or city where your store is located. You can focus blog posts on events, news, information or fun facts about your business’s area.
- Encourage mentions and reviews
Google really likes user mentions of businesses, and it relies almost 40% on reviews when ranking a local business. We should encourage users to talk about our store on our Google Plus page.
- Use geolocation platforms
Did you know platforms like Instagram or Foursquare let you upload geotagged photos? In other words, we can pin our photos to an address, giving Google more signals that our physical store is there.
- List your business in local directories
For local SEO, it’s important to list your business in local directories such as Yelp, QVQ, Páginas Amarillas, etc., and to include a Google map with your business’s location. It’s vital that your name, address and phone number appear correctly in these directories.
Key tip: boost your online store’s SEO
Even if you have both an online and a physical store and only think about ranking them locally, keep in mind that your online store’s on-page SEO still plays a very important role in rankings.
You can’t neglect your text content, page titles, meta descriptions, H1 and H2 tags, URLs, etc. And to strengthen your local ranking, you should include your city, area or related keywords in the elements mentioned above.
It seems Google’s aim for the not-too-distant future is for results to become increasingly personalized, in other words, increasingly local.
