The Insider Guide to Local SEO in 2015

Why Local SEO?

As a business owner you might be asking yourself what is Local SEO and how will it affect my business? No need to worry, Local SEO is simple but vital for your business to flourish online in 2015 and beyond. Local SEO isn’t just about optimizing your site for local traffic anymore it is much more than that.

Search engines have gotten smarter over the past couple of years to start eliminating keywords that don’t belong, and as a result of this, there have been more accurate results. Google came out with a new algorithm in July of 2014 called Pigeon. Pigeon places a much higher standard on local on-page SEO as well as the consistency and precision of local citations.

With these new advances, establishing a strong local SEO value for businesses with variety of locations is more important than ever before.  To help your business gain more foot traffic and online traffic in their local areas, you must optimize your local SEO.

Here are three simple ways you can improve your rankings for Local SEO:

1. Establish Your Company’s NAP- Name, Address, Phone Number

It’s important for any company and website who wants to have a local presence online to have their NAP (name, address, phone number) be consistent across the web. Including this information on your website, page title, and other onsite SEO, as this will help place your company and website higher on location searches. Many search engine algorithms will now look at your store location in relation to where the user is searching from (which is incredibly important with the rise of smart phone searches). Make sure all of your NAP’s are exactly the same because if they are not, then Google may think that you are two separate businesses, whereas a uniform NAP will help your company make a name for itself.

2. Claim Your Local Listings Citations

Now that you have established your company’s NAP on your website, page title and other onsite SEO, the next step is to claim your local listing citations on local directory websites and social media websites. Claiming your listings on a variety of citation websites is key to help your business online. It’s not enough to simply claim your business listing, it is also important to make sure you clean up any mismatched NAP’s, and make sure the information provided is accurate and correct. If you have listings that do not match your NAP, you can usually “claim” the listing in the website or send a request to the site help desk. You want to claim existing listings as it is also negative for local SEO to have multiple business listings for one business. Doing the above mentioned ensures that all the different algorithms search engines use that browse these citation pages will help your business rank higher.

3. Get Client Reviews

Last but not least, one of the most important parts of Local SEO (if not the most important) is client testimonials or reviews. These are vital to success and reputation of your business. They will help you know where you need to improve as a business and to make the changes necessary to make sure you get nothing but positive reviews, leading to a great business reputation online.

According to a 2013 survey on Marketland.com 90% of customers make their buying decisions based on online reviews, and many statistics conclude that people trust online reviews as much as they do personal recommendations from their friends and family.  There are many ways to encourage your customers leave you a review. One of the most important places to get reviews is on Google Plus, and if you haven’t already claimed your listing on Google Maps, we would definitely recommend doing a search for your business, and then filling out your profile completely and correctly. A tool we are quite fond of where you can sign up your business to get more reviews is  iGetReviews.com. This is a great tool that allows local business to encourage positive reviews online, while at the same time, deferring the negative reviews back to the business owner, where businesses can then deal with any issues privately versus having a negative review being permanently placed online and tarnishing your reputation.

Local SEO Utah

We are passionate about getting Local SEO right the first time. Whether you are looking for help to better understand Local SEO or how to best promote your business using SEO, Citations, and Reviews, we can help! Let us take care of your SEO questions and tasks while you focus on running your business. Call 801-413-7734 to get started or find out more information about how Utah SEO Pros can help your business flourish in Local SEO.

Sources:

Schnabel, L. (2014, December 4). 3 Foolproof Local SEO Marketing Tips for 2015 | Groove. Retrieved January 24, 2015, from http://gotgroove.com/ecommerce-blog/3-foolproof-local-seo-marketing-tips-2015/

Gesenhues, A. (2013, April 9). Survey: 90% Of Customers Say Buying Decisions Are Influenced By Online Reviews. Retrieved January 24, 2015, from http://marketingland.com/survey-customers-more-frustrated-by-how-long-it-takes-to-resolve-a-customer-service-issue-than-the-resolution-38756