Local SEO has emerged as a major practice for online businesses trying to reach out to their target audience based in a particular location. There are various steps that you, as an SEO agency or expert, can take to boost your brand visibility and reach out to your target audience in the local domain.
Appropriate Keyword Research
Before you begin with the optimization of your website, you will need to have a clear idea about the keywords that you are going to use. What makes local SEO different from SEO is that you will have to look for geo-specific terms apart from industry related terms.
For instance, a restaurant based in New York may have a number of branches. While working out an optimization strategy, the first thing that you will need to look for is geo-specific keywords and restaurant to find out their search volume. ‘’Keyword Planner’’ is an efficient tool that helps you research a variety of competitive keywords and also provides you with the search volume and competition of individual keywords.
On-site Optimization
After you find out the exact keywords that you are going to target, you will need to start the optimization process. First, you will have to ensure that the local searches find out your targeted locations by taking into account geo-specific information, phrases and keywords present in a number of places in your website content.
One good place to start with, is by incorporating your local address and phone number on all the appropriate pages of your website.Usually, most websites include these details in their footer. But try to make sure that it is placed in the text instead of the image.It helps search engine bots as well as visitors using their cell phones as their contact information is clickable.
Title and Meta Descriptions
When people come across your website in search results, the first thing that they are going to come across is the title tag and meta description.While searching for restaurants in New York, people will come across those keywords in bold across the title and snippet of your website. To work on these two areas, you will need to make use of locally optimized title tags and meta descriptions. The title tag is one of the major aspects in onsite optimization.
Though Google occasionally makes use of alternate titles for search results, you should assume that Google may select the title tag to index your site in its search results.
Google Sitemap Creation
To give Google a clear idea of what your business is all about, you will have to create a geo sitemap and KML file for your website. You can make use of Geo Sitemap Generator to fill in the information related to your company, download files and upload the same on the root folder of your site.
Map Embedding
Once you put an address on Google Maps, you will get an HTML embed code to add the map to your company’s site. You can get the code by clicking on the link icon. Another alternative that you can go for is to click on ”customize” link to choose the size of your map, prior to embedding it on your site. It will help visitors and Google’s search bot to locate your website conveniently.
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