SEO For Local Businesses: If you’re an internet marketer, or own a local business, you have to understand that this campaign is somehow different from a typical non geo-targeted campaign. The strategies that you have to pull off is different from a typical SEO campaign. This means that what used to work to rank an online business has to be done differently if you’re looking forward to rank a website for a specific location, city or country.

SEO for local businesses, in general, is trickier, and doing all these strategies require extra effort and caution. Remember, you’re ranking for a single target location, and chasing those links shouldn’t be your top priority. Before everything else, all you need to do is start from your site to make sure that your webpage is seen on local search results. Here are some of the steps that you have to do to ensure your site is crawled and seen on local results:

NAP

Simply stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. The main point is that you remain consistent all throughout. Whatever is listed on your main website, should be listed all across other places. It doesn’t just stop there – you also have to ensure that the same format should be used on all your pages, including citations and other local directory listings.

Google My Business

You’ve probably seen some of those Google Business listings – some are auto-generated, especially if many people have been checking in. If you have seen your local business to have been auto-generated by Google Places, the first thing that you may want to do is claim it. This way, you’ll have full control over the page. Once you were able to do so, make sure that you use the same format, and NAP on your Google My Business Page.

In addition to which, you should also concentrate on a long, informative business description. Include relevant links as necessary. Choosing the right category is important, as well as uploading numerous photos. If you have business hours, make sure that you include that in your page, as well as a high-resolution profile image and cover photo. Doing all of these things will help you gain traction with regard to traffic on your page, and eventually get your site ranking in local search engines.

Local Reviews

While it is not a good idea to write reviews on your own, in case you get customers, encourage them to write a review for you. These tips are employed by various companies such as NZ Web Design to get customer reviews. You may give them rewards for their time and feedback. You can keep on doing this until you get enough reviews. Local businesses with reviews tend to get pushed on top of search engines – and of course, gets more credibility and reliability with regard to how customers view your site.

SEO for local businesses doesn’t have to be difficult, or complicated. It may consist more steps and may be very different from what we used to know, but ranking in top engines can be easily achieved. If you’re not familiar with how these works, you can always find a local SEO consultant and professional to work on your site.