5 Ways to Optimize Your Website for Local SEO and Skyrocket Its Traffic

Local SEO is a crucial marketing tool for small businesses that primarily want to target local customers, as opposed to a global audience. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, local SEO is a practice to optimize your website in such a way that it can rank higher for local search queries. This will help you generate highly targeted traffic, resulting in better lead generation opportunities and more revenue.

In saying that, however, it’s important to understand that local SEO is different from traditional SEO practices. To achieve the desired results, it'll be important to design an effective local SEO India campaign and follow the right strategies. In this article, we are going to share 5 local SEO tips that’ll help you optimize your website and attract local customers to your website.

So, without any further ado, let’s get started.

Why Local SEO Is Important
According to studies, 78% of local mobile searches lead to an in-store purchase. This means that the majority of people who are looking for nearby services/stores start with a Google search on their mobile phones. In such a scenario, if your website isn’t optimized for local SEO, you’ll most likely miss out on potential leads and stay behind the competition. So, whether you run a coffee shop or a clothing store down the street, local SEO will help you establish an effective online presence for your brand and get more sales.

5 Local SEO Tips to Optimize Your Website

1. Set Up a Google My Business Account
The first step of building an effective local SEO campaign is to set up and optimize your Google My Business account. This will help you appear at the top on Google Maps and climb the search engine ladder in SERP as well.

Setting up a Google My Business (GMB) account is a fairly easy process. All you have to do is provide relevant information (Name, Address, Phone Number, opening hours, etc), verify your business ownership, and add relevant pictures. This way whenever someone will look for your services/products your GMB profile will rank at the top of Google search results and you’ll be able to attract potential traffic to your website.

Here are some of the additional tips to effectively optimize your GMB listing.

• Make sure to provide accurate NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information
• Specify accurate opening and closing hours
• Don’t forget to upload your brand logo. This will make it easier to strengthen your online presence
• Encourage your in-store visitors and online customers to leave a review
• Make sure to reply to all the reviews. Even if someone has left a negative review, it’ll be your responsibility to address it and resolve the person’s query

2. Optimize Your Website for Mobile Users
As surprising as it may sound, more and more people have started to use their mobile phones to find nearby services. In fact, 82% of all local searches are made from mobile itself. This means that if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it’ll most likely become challenging to drive the desired traffic.

The good news is that optimizing a website for mobile isn’t rocket science. You can start by using Google’s mobile-friendly tool to test your website’s mobile-friendliness. It’s an online tool (designed by Google) that’ll give a straight answer on whether your website is optimized for mobile or not. The tool will also provide you with helpful suggestions to optimize the website for mobile users.

Here are a few points that you should remember to make your website mobile-friendly

• Make sure that the website loads quickly on mobile. The ideal loading speed should be less than 3 seconds
• Use larger font so that it becomes easier for the visitors to read the text on small screens
• If you’re using WordPress as your website’s CMS, make sure to choose a responsive theme. This will ensure that people have the same browsing experience across all devices

3. Find Potential Local Keywords
Like traditional SEO, keyword research is an integral part of building a local SEO campaign. However, instead of identifying general search queries, you should focus on evaluating keywords that your local customers will most likely use to find your services.

For instance, if you run a coffee shop in Manhattan, you would want to target “coffee shops in Manhattan, NYC” instead of “coffee shops in NYC” or “Coffee Shops in the USA”. The idea is to look for keywords that’ll make your website pop-up at the top of search results every time a potential customer performs a Google search.

To do this, you can utilize different types of SEO tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and SEMRush. They’ll help you identify the most popular search queries in a specific region and it’ll become much easier to conduct effective keyword research.

4. Acquire Local Backlinks
Acquiring quality backlinks is a way to build strong domain authority (DA) and improve your position in Google SERP. However, when you’re optimizing your website for local SEO, it’ll be important to focus on landing backlinks from high-authority local domains. Why? Because this will showcase the credibility of your website to Google and it’ll become easier to secure top positions in the search results.

You can follow different methods to build local backlinks. However, the easiest way to do this is to look for local websites that accept guest blogs from other authors. Though it may take some time to find such domains, the hassle will be completely worth it, considering you’ll get a high-quality backlink at the end.

Once you’ve narrowed down the list, you can either write a guest blog on your own or look for a guest posting service to have an expert write them for you. In either case, guest blogging will help secure valuable backlinks that’ll eventually improve your site’s authority.

5. Utilize Online Business Directories
Setting up a business profile on different online directories is a great way to improve your online visibility and attract local customers more easily. Directories such as Yelp and Yellow Pages will also make it easier to achieve the desired results from your SEO practices.

However, while setting up a business profile on any of the online directories, make sure to provide accurate business information so that it becomes easier for your customers to contact you.

The Bottom Line
Local SEO is important for every small business that wants to target nearby customers. It’ll help you improve your brand’s visibility and drive targeted traffic to your website more easily. Even though SEO trends keep changing, you can stay assured that the above-mentioned 5 local SEO tactics will keep your brand at the top of Google search results and make it easier to attract your local customers.