7 Local SEO Strategies That Will Win You 3X Customers

Not all businesses are multi-national corporations. Many small businesses out there are trying to attract local customers to their shops, retail stores or food outlets. In the world today, your potential customers search and research online for every little thing they need. Thus, ranking high on the local search results is one of the best ways to attract customers to your shop.

Locally-focused content makes you more visible to the potential customers in your area in an organic manner.

Let’s see how to achieve high local search rankings through your content:

1. Analyze Your Audience and Choose the Right Keywords

Localized content is still mostly produced by news-media, real estate websites like squareyards,  educational service providers such as GoAssignmentHelp. Hence, it is easier to create a niche in the local market if you know who you are writing for and which keywords to use.

There are many excellent ways to know your target audience. In fact, the tool allows content marketers to aggregate information like the location of your audience, their age and gender, their purchase behavior and much more.

Here are a few things this tool can tell you:

• Demographics of your audience (such as their age and gender, lifestyle, education and relationship status, job titles and size of the household)
• Types of Pages they like (which pages does your audience like in different categories such as sports and fashion)
• Geographical facts (such as where your audience lives and what languages they speak)
• How your audience uses Facebook (how frequently they log on to Facebook and which devices they use to log on to FB)
• Purchase Behavior of your audience (such as what kind of goods they frequently purchase, and which kind of purchase methods they use (for example, online shopping and in-store retailing))

Facebook Audience Insights can provide you with the information about your:

– General Facebook audience,

– Custom Audience groups you have created (such as your current customers), and

– People connected to your Page or Event.

Based on what you learn about your audience, you can choose keywords set in local conditions. Then, you can use the Google Keyword Planner to look at the search volumes of the keywords you have chosen. Finalize ones you would like to use and incorporate them in the content you create. 

You may also use Google Trends and Bing to research the key phrases your target customers might be interested in. The three steps you can follow are:

1. Make a list of most popular words and phrases people search for,
2. Choose the ones relevant to you, and
3. Make a page targeting one of them as the main subject.

You may also check the most popular keywords or key phrases in your city, metro area, or state to find the topics you may write on.

2. Write about the Local News

Writing content on local news stories is one of the easiest ways to move up a search engine’s local page rankings. You can write opinions on the news or analyze it to reveal what it means for your target audience.

If you do not find content that your audience might be interested in (in the local newspapers or media sites), then go for the stories related to your business or industry. It would be even better if you offer an expert’s view on what the new developments will mean for the business in your locality.

3. Cover the Local Events

An excellent way to produce local content for your landing pages, blogs or social media channels is to write about the local events. You may share about the local events you host, sponsor or attend. You may also write about the guest lecturers being organized in local schools and universities.

This move will help you position your brand (or yourself) as a community leader. Until the time your landing page climbs up the local search result pages, you can publish and promote your content on social channels as well as the high-ranking local blogs.

It is a good idea to reserve the most relevant news and the content you produce for your own personal (or business) blog. Distribute the rest to the high-ranking local websites that accept guest posts.

4. Address the Top Questions Your Customers Ask

You are a business owner and you are well-versed with the questions your customers ask you most often – offline as well as online. Mark the most common frequent asked questions (FAQs) your customers ask and devote a full page to it. The ranking potential of common questions for a particular business is quite high – and can help you attain your local SEO goals.

You may also highlight your USPs (unique selling points) by creating content that shows how well you understand the local market.

Suppose you are Dissertation Writers in a metropolitan city, then, you may talk about:

– the history of electrical systems in the city,

– electrical issues in different types of localities the city has (stand-alone bungalows, well-planned townships, and downtown-type crowed apartments), or

– lawsuits or accidents in the city that have happened due to faulty wiring and tips on how to avoid such issues.

Such content gives you an opportunity to show your expertise and establish your business as a brand in the local market.

5. Conduct Customer Interviews and Get their Testimonials on Videos

Making videos is super-easy these days. You can film the most impressive projects you are working on using your mobile phones. You may also ask your customers about what they feel about the work you have done for them. These real videos go a long way in helping your prospective clients place trust in your services or products.

Focus on the projects you have done closer to home or in the market, you are targeting. Tell the audience what exactly you did for your clients and how it helped them achieve their goals.

Also, make sure to include a transcript of what is being said in your videos. This text-addition will help you get the local SEO leverage until the search engines learn to glean the keywords from the voice-based content.

6. Make Location-Specific Landing Pages

It is much easier to rank higher in the local SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) if you have got city-specific, state-specific, country-specific or region-specific landing pages.

It is advisable to make one page for each of the locations in which your business is present. In the case of larger businesses that are present in a number of cities, it might be advisable to make specific pages for each state or region or country first. You can, then, work on the micro-locations gradually.

1. Introduce ‘Local Only’ Discounts, Schemes and Special Events

Today’s customers are spoilt for discounts and offers. It doesn’t hurt to offer any location-based discounts that you can throw in to lure in the local customers. Besides ‘12% off for Florida residents’ type discounts, other types of schemes you may introduce for the locals are:

• Free Delivery or Free Shipping,
• Seasonal Discounts (depending on the popular holidays or peak and lean seasons for your business in your area),
• Trade-in Discounts (where you join hands with a business partner in your area to offer special discounts to their customers).

To retain your existing customers, you may offer coupons to customers who buy something for you which they can use to get discounts the next time they buy something for you.

Promote your discounts and offers through your content – and climb up the SERP race.

Conclusion:

Think Beyond the Local Directories In the past, directory links were the end-all of the local SEO tactics. Today, Google My Business is still a great way to reach out to the local audience. We also advise you to start producing hyper-local content if you want to remain at the top of your game.