How to Rank any Local Business Website?

If you own a local business or run an SEO campaign for one, you'll know that it can be tough to drive through lots of traffic to your website.

More often than not, the total traffic potential isn't huge but it's dominated by a few big players - especially within the search engines. It's not always feasible to create giant pieces of content that could perform well on social media because this often brings through a ton of irrelevant traffic, especially if you're promoting a local plumbers website!

What you need is a sustainable flow of relevant traffic from the search engines that can result in leads.

Well, I'm going to show you the steps that I take to rank any local business, and believe me, I've done this a lot of times. Local SEO used to be the main area of speciality for me and it's constantly evolving. If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, follow these steps:
 

Localised On-Page Optimisation
 

On-page SEO for local businesses conforms to some pretty old school SEO tactics. There’s quite a large weighting towards the on-page content in the local search listings, so it’s important that, where possible, you squeeze the most value out of your content.

Here's a quick checklist to follow for local on-page SEO:
  • Try to add your City/Region, plus a relevant keyword, within your landing page title tag.
  • Try to add your City/Region, plus a relevant keyword, within your landing page H1 tag.
  • Try to add your City/Region, plus a relevant keyword, within your landing page URL.
  • Try to add your City/Region, plus a relevant keyword, within your landing page content.
  • Try to add your City/Region, plus a relevant keyword, within your landing page image ALT attributes.
  • Embed a Google map with your business marker into your landing page.

NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number)


Consistency is key here. You need to ensure that you have your full NAP across your whole website (i.e. every page). Furthermore, you must use the exact same details/format when you mention your address on other websites (i.e. local citations).

You’ll also want to use Schema.org markup on your NAP to give the search engines all they need to display your company information correctly.

Here's the code that I use to add in NAP information to local websites with Schema.org markup (just adapt the areas in bold to suit your own business:

http://schema.org/LocalBusiness
">
COMPANY NAME

http://schema.org/PostalAddress
">
ADDRESS LINE 1

CITY
,
REGION

POSTCODE/ZIP
PHONE NUMBER



 

Local Reviews


Local reviews have a direct impact on local search rankings, so you’ll want to spend some time acquiring them.

It’s worth mentioning that this doesn’t just mean Google reviews. You’ll also want to focus on getting reviews on your Yelp page (they’re used by Apple maps), along with other local directories. Your first priority should be Google reviews though.

To begin with, you’ll want to capture any low-hanging fruit by getting in touch with your existing customer base and see if they’d be interested in leaving you a review. You could incentivise them for their time (maybe a discount, etc.).

Another useful tip is to set up a page on your website that gives simple, step-by-step instructions to your customers on how to leave a review for you (make this as simple as possible). This URL (e.g. yourdomain.com/review-us/) could be sent through to your customers in an email, along with a voucher code or some other incentive.
 

Google My Business


If you haven’t already, you’ll need to claim your Google My Business page.

I won't go into all the detail of setting this up because there are tons of articles online showing this, but here are the key things to remember:
  • Add a long, unique description that’s formatted correctly and includes links.
  • Choose the correct categories for your business.
  • Upload as many photos as possible.
  • Add a local phone number to your listing.
  • Add your business address that’s consistent with that on your website and local directories.
  • Upload a high-resolution profile image and cover photo.
  • Add your opening times/days (if relevant).
  • Get real reviews from customers (I’ll come onto this).

Link Building & Citation Building


Link building within local SEO campaigns is incredibly important and it’s also something that’s often overlooked.

Compared to standard SEO campaigns, local SEO relies much more on links from other local websites that are really relevant to your business. It’s less about getting links from high authority websites (although that obviously helps) and more about getting links from websites local to you that are talking about similar things to what you do.

This means that local directories are a useful resource for link building, especially when it comes to building citations.

“A citation is an online reference to your business’s name, address and phone number (NAP).”

These citations don’t even need to be linked, as long as they’re referencing your business NAP consistently in the same way.

Here are a few ways you can get local citations:
  • Use a service like WhiteSpark and get them to find and upload local citations for you.
  • Go through the extensive list of citations on the Moz website and manually submit your citations.
  • Use a tool like Ahrefs, Majestic or Open Site Explorer to run competitive link research and find citations that your competitors have gained.
  • Set up alerts through Mention or Google Alerts to track new mentions of your competitors’ NAP listing.
To support your citations, you'll need to build some good quality links from local websites as well. Here are a few of the strategies that I use to build local links:
  • Go to Meetup.com and search for a list of local events relevant to your industry. Find those that have websites and contact them about sponsorship (most of the time you’ll only need to put on a lunch for them). If they accept, you’ll get a link from their website (local to you) and their Meetup.com page (highly authoritative, local link). Here’s an example.
  • Create a local resource from public data (here’s 30 different data sources) and reach out to local press to get coverage. That’s exactly what Krystian Szastok did and he got some amazing results (you really should read this case study).
  • Run your own local meetup or event and bring through links from the local event page.
  • Sign up to press request services to get quoted in local publications (huge potential for high authority, local links).
  • Run an AMA on Reddit (within a relevant subreddit to your industry) and within other local communities.
  • Line up interviews and columns within relevant online publications.
  • Give a discount to local organizations for your products/services in exchange for a linked mention on their website.
  • Enter local awards (or start your own if there aren’t any!).
  • Spend time dedicated to local PR outreach to get online and offline coverage in local news.
  • Run regular competitive link research and capitalize on any new opportunities that your competitors have gained.
  • Offer scholarships (you get links from local universities) or offer jobs to students (you can get links from their careers pages).

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