7 local SEO tips to improve your local search rankings

Modern businesses are focused on achieving one major milestone today: to rank their company higher amongst the countless search results. There was a time when everyone solely relied on traditional advertisements like newspaper clippings, TV spots, and radio mentions; nowadays, their playground is the social media platforms and blogs.

The thing about digital marketing is that modern ventures wouldn’t be able to survive without it. They offer many tools and opportunities that may positively affect the way consumers perceive a particular brand or product. One efficient method of yielding those results is through local search engine optimisation - or local SEO.

SEO has been making waves throughout the digital marketing industry for years, much so that even start-up businesses can catch up with their more established rivals simply by building a more effective local SEO playbook for their business. 

In order to devise and implement an effective local SEO strategy, you will need to be clear about your goal. A good starting point is to focus on ranking higher for search terms related to your services - and location - with high intent. 

For instance a potential customer searching for “italian restaurant near clapham junction” implies that this particular person knows what cuisine they want to eat and where. That’s way more important for an italian restaurant to rank for than just “restaurant” or even just “italian restaurant”.

Once you have a clear local SEO objective in mind for your business, here are some helpful tips that are guaranteed to improve your local search results.

1. Get your website’s on-site SEO housekeeping in order 

For your website to rank well on search engines, you need your website to be search engine friendly and to make regular updates to it. This is a great place to start simply because it's easier to improve SEO factors on your own website because you have control over it.

Your on-site SEO relates to elements of your website either visible on the page or in the code of your website (which you can't see, but search engines can), which affect your website's search rankings.

Ensuring your core content - home, about, services, etc. - is optimised for keywords too is essential, as is regularly updating your website content. 

Any website that does not update its content will seem stagnant or outdated in your visitors’ eyes. When that happens, they are less likely to engage with your pages, thus, rendering your sites inactive and free from any recent activity. The lack of regular updates will be picked up by Google, resulting in a decrease in rankings. 

2. Ensure your business information is consistent across the web

Online directories can be a direct source of new customers but they can also boost your local ranking within Google.

It's critical that your local business’ address and contact information is correct and consistent across the world wide web. This provides reliable information to Google and other search engines about your business. It also ensures that your customers can find you or contact you.

3. Build your reputation with online reviews

The number and quality of your reviews on Google, Facebook and even some niche industry-specific websites significantly impacts your reputation: the better your reputation, the more customers you're likely to win online.

Positive reviews have the added benefit of making your business rank higher in search results, increasing click-throughs from search and building consumer trust in your business. 

Even negative reviews have benefits. Responding in a timely and courteous manner to try to resolve an unhappy customer’s issues publicly is a great way to show other customers how much you care about your customers’ satisfaction. Handled well, you could even turn an unhappy customer into a big fan!  

4. Own your Google My Business profile

Google My Business is Google's own listing and search product which contains listings of local businesses and places. Listings from Google My Business profiles appear in organic search results and Google maps results on both desktop and mobile devices. 

This is why Google My Business is a hugely powerful marketing opportunity for your local businesses. Optimising your Google My Business and regularly updating it with relevant business information and news is a great way to attract new, local customers to your business.

5. Socialise your business

It's important for your business to utilise social media so that your customers can share their experiences with their friends and (hopefully) turn them into new customers too. 

Facebook and Twitter in particular can also support your local SEO efforts, because they’re easily indexed by Google and other search engines - whereas Instagram for example is closed off.

It's also useful to use social media channels like Facebook to accrue reviews of your local business.

As with your website, it’s important to maintain your social channels with regular updates so - if you’re already regularly creating plenty of new, keyword-rich content for your website for SEO - why not share it via your social channels?  

6. Build your authority

Your perceived authority plays a significant part in how your business ranks in search engine results. This is measured in a number of ways by different search engines, but the number of indexed pages, the number of domains linking to you, and your website age are all taken into consideration by Google et al.

There’s not much you can do to increase the age of your website domain but you can certainly look to create more content to be indexed by Google, and build links from other trusted sources such as industry-specific directories and bloggers.

7. Provide complete and consistent business information across all your channels

Some businesses are not ranking up in the Google search results because they are not providing complete information about their operation. 

Being consistent about your business’ information across all channels - particularly your name, address and phone number (also referred to as NAP) is a big factor here, but so is completeness of information.

For a restaurant for example, have you included information about your menu? What type of food do you serve? Does your restaurant specialise in a specific type of cuisine? 

All of these will be checked by both Google and your customers, and if they find none of those important details, you may end up at the bottom of the list.

Where do I start?

We provide a comprehensive range of local SEO services to support local businesses just like yours. If you’re serious about improving your business’ local seo performance and ranking higher for searches by potential customers in your area, you need a clear understanding of what is and isn’t working for you right now. To get started please get in touch or request a free local SEO audit.