If you’re a local business, optimizing your website for local search won’t only help you get found, but it will help you get found by people who are close and more likely to need what you’re selling.
For local businesses, having a website just isn’t enough to rank well in Google’s local search listings and Google maps top three offerings. The first step to ranking well locally is to set up or claim your business, verify, and optimize a Google My Business Page.
You should treat your Google My Business Page just like your website, and optimize accordingly. It is important to choose the most appropriate primary category and additional categories which are how Google will classify your business. Without this, you will never rank. We also make sure to geotag all images, use keyword variations around the business category without keyword stuffing, and link out to high authority related business profiles like YouTube, Facebook etc.
#ProTip: Make sure to keep your NAP (name, address and phone number) consistent across all websites and profiles in addition to using Schema.org markup on your website and address.
Here at Converge Digital, these steps are crucial for our Local SEO clients and really sets us up for success before we move on to building local citations, social signals, content around the community and keywords each business represents. When done this way, we can really maximize local search rankings.
There is no doubt local SEO matters, and if you decide you don’t have the time, a reputable SEO pro can get this done for you.
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