Local SEO Checklist to Increase the Brand Visibility

Last Updated on September 20, 2018 by Kuldeep Bisht

The responsibility of a business owner does not end just by setting up a website online. The trouble begins only when they do not get proper response as they expected.

Websites are generally created with a purpose of attracting more customers, improving the brand visibility and to make customers aware about the existence of your business. This can be done only when you have a sound knowledge of SEO and content marketing.

Here is a guide that will help you to understand the Local SEO checklist in order to improve your brand visibility and the existence of your business along with getting ahead of the competition.

What is a local SEO?

It is the technique with which your website emerges on the top list of the search engines when users search for any products or services related to the area, city, province or state.

The concept of local SEO is defined as the approach that brings the website at the top most position in the search engine results page by making successful optimization of the website using unique strategies. This is a well known term for many business owners that helps in succeeding their businesses on a worldwide scale. Any business that has a particular address and functions in different areas or localities requires local SEO.

Today, businesses are utilizing world wide web to enhance their business operations by directly communicating and interacting with their audiences. If they fail to reach out to their targeted audiences, other competitors are always there to take advantage of this situation and gain access to them.

To understand this better, lets take below example.

Example: Flowers in New York

When you search for flowers in New York, it shows the list of websites that offer flowers in that area.

Highly standardized content acts as a balancing feature between the visitors and the search engine. The content should be created in such a manner that captures the user’s attention and aims at delivering value to the business in an accurate condition.

Local Search Engine Optimization focuses on catching the maximum traffic from the potential visitors in your city. It is a special practice that makes every business owner an expert and helps them in creating more innovative strategies using the expertise of SEO Background. In order to start the local SEO checklist, you need to follow the following points.

• Avail the city’s physical address that is near to downtown.
• For primary phone numbers, always keep in mind to make a utilization of the local area code.
• In the business title, try to add the keywords of the products and services.
• Bring updation in the business information by adding the matching name, address and other options to the website.
• It is recommended to have Google local place page, but not more than one for the business. Eliminate the extras, if possible.

What is the purpose of Local SEO?

Being a business owner, it is all the more pertinent for you to know the purpose of local SEO because every business needs to be recognized in the area where it is functioning. If your business intends to offer any service or sell any product, you need to work towards listing your business on top of local SEO search results in order to attract more customers. Generally, people start searching for products or services by specifying an area; and this is the right time to make sure that your products or services are available to them because they are in need. Local SEO involves an effective optimization process for achieving the desired local outputs.

Content marketing and the local SEO go hand in hand and both work in the same direction for bringing the visitors towards your site thereby generating more and more sales leads for your business. There are different methods for getting the optimal outputs using both the strategies such as creating a blog on a regular basis, practicing social media marketing, utilization of images and videos, use of online reviews and keeping it in a consistent mode. All such practices, when followed together will lead the business on a great path of prosperity and success.

Example: Restaurants in New Jersey, Beauty parlour in London etc.

Advantages of local SEO

• The practice of local SEO focuses on enhancing your business to higher ranks in the search engine result page. This is only possible when your business is having a large number of potential visitors.
• The conversion rate will be higher when more and more visitors visit your website. This is really a good sign for developing your business on a successful path.
• When a large number of audience is searching for the business at a specified location, then there are more chances of getting the enhancement in the brand visibility as well as awareness about that particular business.
• The website that is properly optimized can get you more returns of investment, which results into the growth of your business in a more prospective direction.

Significance of Content in SEO

As we all know that content plays a dynamic role in the concept of search engine optimization. In other words, it is safe to state that content is the central part of the SEO, without which the potential customers can not be generated. Even in the present year, the main focus has been on the development of unique and meaningful content that enhances the visibility of the website in the search engine result page. The marketers are advised to create the most effective and precious content that helps in generating the desired outputs. The approach of the content creation starts and ends by keeping the users requirements and their expectations in mind. Of course, the final objective of the marketer lies in the enhancement of the sale leads in such a manner that creates valuable results for the complete development process.

Understanding regarding the user’s search strategies

It is very essential for the marketers to develop powerful content in such a way that associates with users’ interests, their online behaviours, and requirements, which makes them more aware about your brand and its identity. Here, are some of the points that one should keep in mind for increasing the target audiences towards the site.

• Make an analysis of current data from the valuable sources that involves social, search and other desirable properties for identification of the user’s requirements and the trends.
• See how the content looks like in the search and what the users of the competitors’ content trying to view while searching for the matching concepts and keywords.
• Try to examine your competitors’ content in order to understand what your target audience wants to view in the search.
• Identify the user’s expectations and their requirements from your brand.
• Create an engaging story using the information you have, which helps in the identification of the trends, expectations and interests of the targeted audiences in a more unique manner.

How can Local SEO help you with your business?

• Brand Visibility – You get a brand visibility for your products and services as more and more people get to see your company address and details.
• Customers Visit – Once customers understand the products and services your business deals in, they access your website to know more about the company. If it is not listing on the top of the search engine, your website might not be accessible to all customers.
• Improvement in the Conversions – When many customers visit the website based on the local search, you can notice a drastic improvement in the number of conversion rates.
• Growth of the business – When you concentrate on Local SEO for your website, you are able to meet the requirements of the customers who are looking for products and services in a particular area and in this way you get more customers and your income increases.

Who needs local SEO?

As a business owner, you need to understand your target areas as well as the customers that you have to concentrate on. Every business may not need local SEO, especially when you are looking to sell your products and services to global customer, there is no need for Local SEO as it may refine the search to a particular area. If your business needs people from one or few particular areas, it is wise to go for Local SEO. On the other hand, if you have customers across the world, the local SEO will be of no help.

How to think from a customer’s angle?

While concentrating on content marketing, you also need to wear the hat of a user or customer. You need to think from the customer’s end and create the keywords accordingly. Just imagine yourself sitting on the other end and searching for a service or product online, you get a lot of keywords that a customer might use to search as per his need so use that as a marketing strategy to develop your business. You can gain success by understanding the online behaviour of you the online users.

What analysis and researches you should do?

You need to analyse the market situation before arriving at any conclusion. Your business needs more research and analysis so that you can take action according to the current market situation. In Local SEO, you have to identify the current searches and scenarios so that the performance of your business is great.

• Start analysing the data from search
• Type relevant keywords and find what appears on the search
• Look for competitors of your business
• Understand the competitor’s way of attracting customers
• Look for the keywords and the results it fetches
• Find out the technique that your competitor uses
• Find out the attractive ways that are used to grab the customer’s attention.
• Analyse what are customers need
• Create a story with the data collected and use it for developing your business

How to build your purpose of Local SEO?

You have to realise that whatever marketing technique that you employ is really dependent on the way you improve your business and gain customers. You have to be clear in understanding the minds of your target audience and act accordingly. Whatever you do, keep your customers in mind!

• Create a content that will help your customers by making it informative and creative
• Build the contents that concentrate on top keywords and topics
• Make your contents friendly to be read and understood
• Find out the best way to share the content which has maximum customers reach
• Concentrate on the quality and the truth of the content
• Understand the performance of users and search engines
• Create contents with necessary details and keep them up to date
• Create quality contents on latest topics that can grab the attention.
• Maintain the quality of the contents and blogs periodically

What are the Local SEO checklists to enhance the visibility of your business?

Hope you have understood the importance of Local SEO and how it develops your business.

Here is a checklist that will help you to optimize your website for the customer who does a local search.

1. Begin with your company Logo – Any search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing gets access to the company logo on your website. Make a unique and attractive logo and make sure the image name of the logo makes a meaningful sentence that describes your business. You can also give description about your business in the image so that it makes it easy for the users to access your website with the details mentioned. You can also use the location on the image file. To make your logo’s visibility popular, use the same logo in multiple search engines and online pages like your social media, websites and business pages.
2. Title and Description plays a major role – As you know, the title of the content plays a very important role for it has to be user friendly and search engine friendly. Pick out attractive topics and title that can grab the attention of your customer instantly. The title of your content will help the user find out if it is relevant for his search. With an interesting topic, there is a greater opportunity for you to gain more customers. When you create a local SEO, the title can include the location and also contact details if needed.
3. Home page with full contact details –  When you create your website, you need to make sure that the home page of your website owns the address, phone number email addresses as well as all required contact information related to your business. It would be best if the contact information is in the form of text rather than images. The contact information must be placed at the side of the page, which can grab the attention of the users.
4. Contact details on the other pages – When the contact information on the homepage is more important, it should be your priority as well as preference to have contact numbers mentioned as footer in the other pages too. Every page of your website should have the contact information so that it can make more convenient for the users to contact you. Majority of the users prefer to do the business only with those who have mentioned the proper contact details of the company.
5. Use Google Maps – It is very easy to use Google maps on your web pages. You can use Google map on your contact information page to make it easier for the users. For Location based searches, Google maps are the best to use and it can guide the user to reach you easily.
6. Google + Business Page can help – Google + has a business page where you can enter the details about your business like the address, phone number, email, fax so on and so forth and also a complete description about the company and its products and services. Make sure you use the same address on the website and also on the Google+ page that can fetch you good customers.
7. Google places for business – Google offers many services for business owners to enhance their business and you can utilize them to make your business grow. You can register for their service, Google places for business and their team verifies your contact information and your business and provide good reviews to the customers.
8. Google Ads – You can also opt for Google Ads services where you can post ads related to your services and the customers can get the information easily.
9. Local works, Yahoo – Yahoo can also help you with the local listing of your business, which is a paid service. Once you register for the local works service provided by Yahoo, you need to make sure that the Yahoo account is linked to your websites and also to the Google + business page that can create more links and gain good number of customers.
10. Bing for places – Registering with Bing for places is free and easy. Just link them with your Google + business page.
11. Social Medias can be of good help – According to the latest trend, you can gain more customers through Social media like Facebook and Twitter. You can create a page for your business in Facebook and link them with your business page and website. It will definitely do the magic.
12. Respond to reviews and comments – Go through the list of free online services and you can register your business with local directories and services like Foursquare, Yelp etc. The most important thing you need to note is to respond to your customer for every review and comment they post. Make your customers understand the existence of your business by replying back to every customer regarding their comments on various platforms.
13. Mobile Friendly Websites – You need to understand the current fact that most of the customers use a mobile phone or a smartphone to search for local information. Create your website which is compatible with mobile devices so that your customers can easily locate it through their mobile. It is very important to understand that most of the Local searches are done using mobiles; and only with mobile optimization, you can help the customer who is actively searching for you.
14. Blog about your company and business – Do you know blogs can also help you in your business? High quality blogs related to your product and services with a locating linking can help you improve the visibility of your business. Blogs with local keywords and location keywords can be of good help.
15. You Tube – Uploading entries about your company and website on YouTube can do wonders with proper keywords and title. It is the most wonderful practice that is widely used in the present time to make the people aware about the various product and the services.

Wrap up

From the above approaches, we conclude that the Local SEO is very important for every business that targets local customers and for customers who are trying to find the existence of a service or business in their area. It is very essential to Understand and follow the above mentioned checklist for a successful business.

Leverage the Local SEO checklist for the creation of more powerful and relevant content by having the knowledge about the elements of the digital approaches. Focus on viewing the SEO Concepts and the Content advertising as the partners. In this way, your brand will be able to build the accurate content for the audiences in a timelier manner. When you are working on content creation, always use the ideas that are innovative and the latest trends that attract the users on a large scale.