Building Local Citations
When it comes to local SEO, there are three important things that Google takes into consideration: the time that your business or domain has been around, links or citations back to your website, and reviews. Though getting links is important, including local citations is essential in order for Google to know your location. You must have local directions or citations pointing to your website, which should include consistent information – contact number, address and email, among others.
To do this properly, you can use a tool like White Spark/Moz Local. On the other hand, if you prefer to do-it-yourself, you can make use of an automated directory solution. However, you can get a better outcome from tools such as White Spark/Moz, as well as our own SEO services that manually make each and every local citation.
Create Local Editorial Links
Aside from citations, you should also have editorial links that do not come with nofollow tags in them. All directories/citations include their outbound links as as rel=”nofollow”, telling Google to not crawl the link to your website. So, you have to get do-follow links to your website. You can come across very significant local sites like local blogs or national blogs that are related to your industry. In this way, Google can provide you with results from sites that permit contributing writers. Next, send an email to them and secure a spot then write content for them. Though they often nofollow the links in your bios, your articles can have links to your actual site.
Build Social Media Signals
This is a lot different from simply doing social media. First, you have to post your blogs on your social media platforms, then build relations with your target market. Promote content to website visitors by retargeting, promoting it to people within your area (note: it is a must to use great content, so if you have not created such, start now) and utilize all possible advertising tools to get likes, views and shares for your content. This lets Google see that people talk about you, and your content is a good source for keywords you include.
Get Reviews
User generated content is among the three most important things Google takes a look at. They want to make out the things that viewers say about you. So, make sure to send them over to your Google+ and Yelp pages to write their reviews, then look for review sites in your niche by searching with the use of your keywords and “reviews”. When you receive real, great and positive reviews, Google will value your website over others, provided that you have the other important parts: links/citations, plus the time you have been active.
Measure Your Traffic
The moment you apply these strategies, remember to measure your traffic in order to benchmark your progress. Make use of Google Analytics plus Webmaster Tools in segmenting your organic search traffic. When your traffic, rankings and sales go up, you can rest assured that your local SEO campaign is thriving.
Karina Popa