LOCAL SEO

The Internet might be global in nature, but if your business is local do local SEO, it makes no sense to concentrate on global reach, when your customers live in your city, or even in your neighbourhood.
For local SEO businesses getting a global reach is a waste of resources. Instead, you should concentrate on the local community. These simple tips how to optimize your site for local searches are a must for local seo, if you rely on the local market. Maybe you are already doing some of them and you know what works for you and what doesn’t. Anyway, if you haven’t tried them all, try them now and see if this will have a positive impact on your rankings (and your business) or not. You might be asking how you can do it, when the Web is global and Google doesn’t classify sites according to their location. Here is how you can go with local SEO:

LOCAL SEO MELBOURNE

WAYS TO DO LOCAL SEO

1 .Use your location in your keywords.

The first trick is to do local seo is to use your location in your keywords. For example, if you are in London and you sell car insurance, your most important key phrase should be “car insurance London” for local seo because this key phrase contains your business and your location and will drive people who are looking for car insurance in London in particular.

2. Use your location in Meta tags.

Meta tags matter for search engines and you shouldn’t miss to include your location for local seo, together with your other keywords in the Meta tags of the pages of your site. Of course, you must have your location in the keywords you use in the body text for local seo because otherwise it is a bit suspicious when your body text doesn’t have your location as a keyword but your tags are stuffed with it in local seo.

3 .Use your location in your body text

Keywords in the body text count a lot and you can’t afford to skip them for local SEO. If your web copy is optimized for “car insurance” only, this won’t help you rank well with “car insurance London”, so make sure that your location is part of your keywords while doing local seo.

4 .Take advantage of Google Places and Yahoo Local

Google Places and Yahoo Local are great places to submit to because they will include you in their listings for a particular location in local seo.

5. Create back links with your location as anchor text

It could be a bit tricky to get organic back links with your location in local seo as anchor text because some keywords with location don’t sound very natural – for instance, “car insurance London” isn’t grammatically correct and you will hardly get an organic inline link with it but you can use it in the Name field to comment on blogs. If the blog is do follow, you will still get a back link with anchor text that helps for SEO.

6. Get included in local search engine

Global search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo can bring you lots of traffic but depending on your location, local search engines might be the real golden mine for local seo. A local search engine could mean a search engine for the area (though it is not very likely to have regional search engines) or more likely for your country in local seo . For instance, Baidu is a great option, if you are selling on the Chinese market while doing local seo.

7. Get listed in local directories

In addition to local search engines, you need to try your luck with local directories for local seo. You might think that nobody reads directory listings but this isn’t exactly so. For instance, Yellow Pages are one of the first places where people look when searching for a local vendor for a particular product go for local seo.

8. Run locally-targeted ad campaigns

One of the most efficient ways to drive targeted, local traffic for local seo to your site is with the help of locally-targeted ad campaigns. PPC ads and classifieds are the two options that work best for local seo.

9. Do occasional checks of your keywords

Occasionally checking the current search volume of your keywords is a good idea because shifts in search volumes are quite typical for local seo. Needless to say, if people don’t search for “car insurance London” anymore because they have started using other search phrases and you continue to optimize for “car insurance London”, this is a waste of time and money. Also, keep an eye on the keywords your competitors use – this will give you clue which keywords work and which don’t while doing local seo.

10. Use social media

Social media can drive more traffic to a site than search engines and for local search this is also true for local seo. Face book, Twitter, and the other social networking sites have a great sales potential because you can promote your business for free and reach exactly the people you need when doing local seo. Local groups on social sites are especially valuable because the participants there are mainly from the region you are interested in in local seo.

11. Ask for reviews and testimonials

Client reviews and testimonials are a classical business instrument and these are like letters of recommendation for your business in local seo. However, as far as SEO is concerned, they could have another role. There are review sites, where you can publish such reviews and testimonials (or ask your clients to do it) and this will drive business to you with local seo. Some of these sites are Yelp and Merchant Circle but it is quite probable that there are regional or national review sites you can also post at.

12. Create separate pages for your different locations

When you have business in several locations, this makes the task a bit more difficult because you can’t possibly optimize for all of them with local seo– you can’t have a key phrase such as “car insurance London, Berlin, Paris, New York”. In this case the solution is to create separate pages for your different locations. If your locations span the globe, you can also create different sites on different, country-specific domains (i.e. uk.co for GB, .de for Germany, etc.) but this is only reasonable to do for local seo, if your business is truly multinational. Otherwise, just a separate page for each of your locations will do in local seo.