Digital Marketing is now considered the world’s most powerful marketing tool, and SEO is the driving factor behind today’s online success.
Since the global pandemic, online behaviour has changed along with two major algorithm updates by Google. One of the more significant shifts has been in searches for ‘near me’.
Local SEO is now a crucial component of a business’s success not only in Canberra and around Australia but in many other countries.
Source: Google.com
Local communities have come together looking to support local businesses, a trend that the marketing community has noticed and is offering local SEO services.
The aim is to obtain valuable local traffic to buy online, become a lead, or come to your office or store.
Here we list the most basic but crucial local SEO factors you need to consider to get the best results.
Let’s dive in.
10 Local SEO Requirements to Grow Your Business in 2023
Google Business Profile
Formerly known as ‘Google My Business, ‘ Google Business Profile is your starting point to get your business listed and start to build your local online visibility.
A complete set-up can take less than one hour, so even for an overworked business owner or a start-up, you will have the time to get yourself up and running; click on the link above and get started.
The simple goal is to obtain more traffic to your website, more store visits, and up your contact rates in general.
Google Business Profile is integrated through many features and applications that help users find you.
NAP Still Counts
NAP is the abbreviation of ‘Name, address and phone number’. It has been around for some time but is as essential for local SEO today as ever.
It is not complex, and you must ensure your details are 100 percent correct and mirrored throughout all your web pages.
We will talk about optimisation later in the article. You should have this part correct from the beginning.
For those who have Google Business Profile but details have changed, you will need to update and uniform, so you are already fully optimised for local SEO.
Use Google Maps for Leverage
Source: Unsplash.com
Once registered, look to add a Google Map of your business to your ‘Contact Us’ or ‘About Us’ page. This will act like a beacon for search engines to locate your business, recognise your bricks and mortar location, and start to tie everything together for local searches.
Social Media Integration
Social media platforms are now ranking factors for Google; this was not the case in the past.
They also help gain a sharing and viral audience that helps build brand awareness.
With a host of SEO-friendly backlinks that it generates, it’s important to align it with your overall SEO strategy as they help double down on both organic and local SEO searches.
Gather Reviews
It is always good for business owners to ask themselves what they would do.
A prime example is:
- When did I last purchase a service or product without any prior research?
Then ask yourself:
- Have ratings and reviews affected my decision to purchase that service or product?
A common trend across the internet is for people to search for 5-star ratings and reviews. The popularity of TripAdvisor is a prime example for people travelling, eating and more.
What you should do in your local community is reach out to existing satisfied customers, don’t just wait and hope for a good review. If you keep your customer details, contact them with new products or services once in a while, then with a link kindly asking for a review.
These can help direct users to you a lot quicker.
SEO-Friendly URLs
URLs can be easy to overlook within an SEO framework.
For organic and local SEO searches, URLs help the search engine crawlers fully understand the depiction of each web page.
So ensuring your URLs are clear, well-written and related to the content topic is vital.
As an example, htpps://www.myfirstwebsite.com/123/456/find_info is not going to benefit your ranking with the crawlers compared to a URL that clearly defines what the page represents.
In some extreme cases, Google may even think it’s a spammy link. So take a look at how to structure a URL.
Meta Titles and Descriptions – Don’t Overlook them
Smaller or new businesses can overlook ‘technical SEO’.
Meta titles and descriptions now play a significant role in organic and local SEO.
You will find that many website platforms do have tabs to affect these, and most are easy to use.
It is worth looking into what Google recommends for writing them and the number of words or characters to use. These act as an initial mini-guide to anyone searching.
On-Page and Off-Page Optimisation
If you have had an online presence for a while or have been looking into SEO in 2022, you will have undoubtedly come across the word ‘optimisation’.
However, understanding its importance is imperative to understanding the road SEO has taken to get the required results.
Due to the importance (and rightly so) of content curation, keywords and link building, this side can get overlooked. This will leave you with a website that functions but is not rated highly by the search engines and, therefore, not gaining traffic and interaction.
Here Ahrefs highlight the difference between the two and the importance of both.
Things such as your sitemap being submitted to Google and there are no page errors, and they are all submitted correctly to be indexed are things both overlooked and misunderstood and play a vital role.
Backlinks and Referrals
Backlinks still form the basis of SEO and high search engine ranking.
The search engines look for these to see that you have authority within your industry. When you have linked your other companies that also provide good information, services and products, this informs Google clearly that you are trusted and therefore offer quality to their user’s searches.
Reaching out to other companies within your field in your local area, town or city will help grow your backlink catalogue.
Here Semrush explains the best way to go about building backlinks. You need to understand this area and be careful not to listen to anyone with link schemes or cut corners, as Google is aware of these and will penalise you.
Outbound and Internal Links for Credibility
Including high-quality links within your content to other domains and websites will get more attention and higher rankings.
By sourcing other credible companies with high domain authority, you increase yours. Make sure you don’t reference low-authority websites, as it has the opposite effect.
Moz provides a free checker to see the authority of other websites. Typically look for over 50 as a score; anything under that, try to avoid.
Internal Links serve a different purpose. These play a pivotal role in your ‘Sales Funnel’, helping guide a visitor to your site towards becoming a lead or, if you are an eCommerce site, towards becoming a paying customer.
So they are strategically placed throughout your site to engage. Your content should grab the user’s attention about what you provide and internal links, then guide them to where you want.
Google will rank you higher as they show that you deliver good ‘User Experience (UX)’ for their users, making you more visible.
SUMMARY
We hope the points and links within this article will be informative and help you make the initial steps towards gaining local exposure. You may want to hire the services of an SEO company to enhance your local SEO once you are up and running, as 2023 is going to be highly competitive. Good luck.
