Top 5 Local SEO Tactics To Outrank Your Competitors

Local SEO is an essential element to local business success. Local search tactics can help your customers find you and are vital for businesses in competitive industries, such as legal, medical, food and beverage, and more.

In fact, “85%-95% of consumer engagement for brands now happens through location assets, like local pages and listings,” according to Robert Blatt, CEO of MomentFeed.

That’s a clear call to action for businesses to leverage local SEO tactics to boost customer conversions. The following locale SEO tactics can help with this. Let’s take a deeper look.

Utilize Local-Minded Online Platforms

Consumer behaviour has changed over the past few years. Customers no longer trust marketing messages from brands. Consumers are now making buying decisions based on recommendations from friends, family, and influencers and the ratings and reviews they find online.

This is okay news for local businesses since they can utilize online listings and review sites to gain buyer trust. For instance, you can list your local business on Yelp and gather several positive customer reviews and ratings.

“Yelp has 132 million visitors every month,” Leigh Held of Entrepreneur said. “According to Nielsen, four out of five users visit the site when they want to spend money. There is a ton of money to be made and lost on Yelp.”

Other online review sites and listings to utilize are:

• Foursquare
• TripAdvisor
• Yahoo Local
• Angie’s List
• Yellow Pages
• White Pages

Get Listed On Google My Business

If your local business is not listed on Google My Business, it simply doesn’t exist online. Your businesses name, address, phone number, location, URL, and more are all listed on Google My Business.

You have used Google My Business when searching for local vendors for your business. These results appeared after entering search terms like “printing near me.” Then several businesses pop up on Google Maps as well.

There are, however, a few Google guidelines to follow. You want to capitalize on local keywords to get more online visibility. Still, you can’t do it using spammy local SEO tactics. For example, your domain name on Google My Business can have ranking power.

This is an important local SEO tactic if you’re currently developing your business and site. Knowing how to choose a domain name optimized for local search rankings is one local SEO tactic that can catalyze growth and success. For instance, denverinjurylawyer.com could be a powerful domain name if you’re an injury lawyer in Belfast.

Leverage Schema Markup

Schema markup can significantly impact your business, making it a must-do local SEO tactic. What is schema markup? It is less complicated than it sounds. Simply code you implement into your HTML.

Essentially, schema markup helps Google understand your website’s content better, including name, location, phone number, etc., providing the information to improve searcher’s intent. This can boost your site’s rankings and increase CTR.

According to Neil Patel, “When a website has schema markup in place, users can see in the SERPs what a website is all about, where they are, what they do, how much stuff costs, plus plenty of other stuff. Some people have taken to calling schema markup your virtual business card.”

Make Your Website Local

Another effective local SEO tactic is to make your website highly localized. This may seem common sense, but many site owners need to consider this when doing basic optimization tweaks.

You can make your entire site local by integrating local keywords (city, post-code, county, etc.) into URLs, H1 and H2 tags, meta descriptions, footer, and content. This helps Google understand your location better, thus providing your site to searchers over the competitors that don’t use this tactic.

Build A Robust Local Link Portfolio

It is no secret that link-building is an influential ranking factor. If you’re a local business, having as many local natural and relevant links is ideal for pointing to your website. This creates a link web on the local search level and validates your location for Google.

How do you do this? Link building can be challenging but more manageable if you have a reputable local business. For example, connect with businesses in your community that are relevant and set up an affiliate program.

A business that is relevant to yours can have a link on its site or in one of its blogs that points to your website. If you get a customer who clicks through from that link to your site and makes a purchase, you’ll kick back a percentage of the sale to the referring site.

You can also get listed on local government sites, like city hall, as well as a sponsor for local events, like 5k runs. Local link-building can be easily accomplished with a bit of time and creativity.

Local SEO Wrap Up . . . 

You can implement several local SEO tactics for local business growth and success. If you want to outrank your competitors, take a few tactics of the above, or all of them, and start growing your customer base today.