Local SEO is the way to go in 2024! Whether a potential customer searches for a nearby coffee shop or needs a household service, people are more likely to use search engines to find local businesses offering their wants and needs. Ranking high in search result pages increases organic exposure to businesses and can be the difference between a thriving local diner and one struggling to gain customers.
With over thirty years of experience in strategically increasing search engine ranking, Premiere Creative has compiled an expert guide of tips to dominate local SEO to make your business thrive.
Local SEO and Its Value
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a set of strategies a business can implement to improve a website’s ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs). Search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Amazon, rank results based on relevance, giving top results more user exposure. Through implementing SEO strategies, websites will notice an increase in SERP rankings and have a higher organic viewer rate.
SEO and increasing search rank prove particularly important for local businesses due to the direct impact of online visibility within their target audience. By implementing effective SEO strategies, local businesses can attract more website traffic, leading to increased consumer engagement and conversions. SEO offers a cost-effective marketing approach, allowing local businesses to establish a strong online presence within their communities.
Essential Local SEO Strategies
Google My Business Optimization
Google My Business (GMB) is a free tool offered by Google, specifically designed to increase the visibility of local businesses. It functions by allowing businesses to personalize and control information displayed on Google Search and Maps. This tool is extremely influential in local search results, making it important for businesses to optimize their profiles to be relevant and accurate. When a user searches for a product or service, GMB listings in the local vicinity are prominently featured, allowing for higher result placement; this has an impact by driving website traffic and attracting local customers.
Google My Business profiles display critical information such as business name, location, phone number, category listing, and operating hours. GMB optimization can include adding high-quality images, social media links, and website links.
Keyword Research and Targeting
Keyword research is essential for optimizing your business’s presence in searches; however, local keyword research goes one step further, by optimizing business presence to relevant and nearby searches to attract more relevant potential customers. Keywords to attract nearby potential customers typically include geographical references, such as city names, neighborhood names, or terms such as ‘near me’.
When conducting research on local keywords, one can utilize tools such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to gain insights into effect keywords tailored to an industry and locational region. Another way to identify local keywords is to type general keywords into Google and note autocomplete suggestions or related searches. These provide insight into popular searches.
After identifying strong local keywords, integrate these naturally into website content; for example, keywords can be featured in business listings, blog posts, or hashtags to improve SERP ranking locally, adjusting your website to nearby customer searches.
Online Reviews and Local Reputation
Search engines consider online reviews as a significant ranking factor for local businesses, often ranking businesses with the highest reviews higher in relevance. When a business has multiple high-quality reviews, search engines interpret this information as a signal of business quality, ranking the business higher on the search engine results page for increased user satisfaction.
Encouraging customers to leave positive reviews is essential for increasing SEO effectiveness. This can be done naturally by providing excellent customer service and adapting your business to previous customer feedback, or inorganically by providing direct links to review platforms in emails and incentivizing reviews through discounts.
Craft a Compelling Headline and Meta-Description
Headlines and meta-descriptions are the first copy that users will see in search engine results. This makes them extremely influential in driving click-through rates (CTR) and increasing website traffic. Optimizing headlines and meta-descriptions should improve visibility in local searches, boosting the likelihood that users will visit your site; this increased engagement signals to search engines that site content is relevant and valuable and increases SEO performance.
Powerful headlines and meta-descriptions are concise and engaging and utilize strong keywords with locational tags. These should be tailored to appropriate word count length to avoid sentences or phrases being cut off with ellipses.
Ensuring Excellent Website Quality
Search engines utilize crawlers to gather website information and index this into search results. Crawlers determine where a website should be ranked based on user experience, measuring factors such as website speed and mobile optimization. If a website is determined as high quality by crawlers, this positively impacts SERP ranking.
Local SEO Case Studies
Premiere Creative has been creating local SEO strategies for over thirty years, providing numerous positive case studies on clients past and present.
Shoreline Pools
One client, Shoreline Pools, once struggled to increase online brand awareness despite being the largest independent pool renovation and construction company in the Northeast. The Premiere Creative team created a strategy to increase local brand visibility through local SEO tactics; this included website redesign for mobile optimization, implementation of an SEO keyword-rich blog webpage, and creation of a Google My Business account. This strategy grew website visibility; Shoreline Pools’ blog reached up to 15,000 views per month and GMB generated up to 10,000 impressions per month. Through increased website engagement, Shoreline Pools attracted 800 online leads per year and increased annual growth by over 100%.
New Jersey Spine Specialists
New Jersey Spine Specialists faced a similar challenge of low brand visibility within their target geographical region. As a result, Premiere Creative created twelve new blog posts, focused on various services offered that were rich in SEO keywords in relation to locations in New Jersey. Once posted, New Jersey Spine Specialists drew traffic from more than one hundred towns in New Jersey and generated thousands of visits to their blog page. From this generated website engagement, New Jersey Spine Specialists witnessed an increase of 1,000% in website engagement.
Grow Your Business with Local SEO
Powerful strategies for increasing local SEO require a multi-faced approach; from optimizing GMB profiles to managing online reviews, each aspect is crucial to identifying local businesses as relevant and valuable to SERPs. With a deep understanding of the northern NJ and NYC markets, the Premiere Creative team of experts can tailor an SEO strategy to drive lasting results for your local business. Contact Premiere Creative today at (973) 346-8100 to grow your customer base in the competitive local market!