Why Local SEO Matters to Your Business

You already know how important SEO is to your site and its rankings. But did you know that besides regular SEO, there’s also something called “local SEO?” Local search is another great way to get your website ranked and seen by your target customers. It’s also a great way to optimize your site so that customers searching for a local business like yours will see your site.

As local competition becomes a priority, it’s necessary that you stay on top of your brand’s rankings or else you’ll lose potential business to your competitors.

Working with a San Antonio SEO company can help.

Here are some helpful local SEO basics you’ll want to start incorporating into your SEO strategic marketing plans:

Claim your business in online directories

Consumers usually use search engines to do local searches on various needs. But small businesses aren’t routinely claiming local business listings. This can be a big missed opportunity for getting their brand seen. It’s essential that you get your company listed right and stay on top of popular online business listings like Citysearch and Yelp.

Also do a search to see what other local directories your business is on. Make sure all the important data is correct. See if you can get your business’ name, phone number and address on major citation data aggregators like Acxion, Neustar and the like.

Always pay attention to your website’s title and meta description tags. These are what will be displayed in search results. They’re like small ads that you need to carefully craft. It’s easy to see what they will look like or how many characters you can use when you use Yoast’s SEO Plugin for WordPress.

Remember that space is precious and every word and character counts.

Your online reviews are important

People really look at online reviews, so you don’t want to ignore them. You want to make sure that you stay on top of all reviews so that you can address the ones that might be negative. Also, get your customers to create reviews of your service, too.

Respond to whatever reviews your business gets. You should focus getting positive reviews on Facebook and on Google My Business. These reviews will show up in Google searches and can even factor into your rankings.

Claim and optimize Google My Business

Google My Business is an online directory that is super important for you to claim. It’s free and can get you tons of local exposure if you’ve optimized your page right. You’ll need to go through a verification process to fill out your page.

Then once it’s good to go. Fill in the page with a description of your business and all the information it asks you to complete.

Utilize local structured data markup

You’ll want to add structured data markup to your site’s code in order to give search engines like Google more information on your business so it’ll all show up in searches. This will make your company stand out and even rank higher than competitors on search engines.

Structured data markups help their spiders determine what your site is about so that the search engine knows if your site is worthy of higher rankings.

Local SEO Wrap-up

With these local SEO tips, you’ll be able to get your business seen by potential customers over your competition! Get started with our SEO plan today.