Introduction

What is local SEO?

Suppose you started a new business. You want to be noticed.  You want to market your products to a local audience in order to gain brand image. Local SEO would be the best way to do it. It allows you to get your website to be ranked higher on local search results. Therefore, local SEO is a part of search engine optimization through which you can optimize your website, local profiles and online reviews in order to ensure that when searches are made on topics relevant to your business and near your business, your content will be higher in the search results.

Why is local SEO important?

Research has shown that about 46 % of all searches made on Google are made with “local intent”. This means that about one in two people in Google, when searching for something to buy, is looking for local products or services. Moreover, it is also estimated that 56% of local retailers have not listed their names in “Google My Business”.  This goes to show that a huge portion of retailers is not utilizing this massive opportunity of gaining customers for their business through local SEO.

The entire horizon of SEO has expanded and changed drastically over the past few years. In addition, it is expected to rise even more as time passes. Hence, optimizing your local SEO is starting to become a cornerstone of beginning a business. Many users have tried to find loopholes to take advantage of SEO. However, with newer updates from Google, it is becoming more and more difficult for these people to continue with these hacks to get a better rank on searches. That is, now if you want higher ranks, you have to work on providing more accurate, more relevant and, overall, better content. There is no longer any shortcut towards getting better customer recognition. Nevertheless, the good news in all of it is that you, as a business, have a straight path towards the same outcome.

How do I optimize my local SEO?

To cover the basics of local SEO, all you have to do is start by focusing on optimizing your website, managing your Google profile and online business citations as is mentioned in this guide. However, for getting the best results out of your SEO, it is highly recommended that you go through this entire guide, chapter by chapter, because it will provide you with an in-depth manual that will get you started right away.

1. Title Tags

Title tag is one of the most important parts of any SEO strategy. It is usually a major part of the content used for search engine results since it highlights exactly what the page is about. Therefore, it provides users with a summed up version of what the actual content of the page is. It acts as the cover of the book, which is the page. Only, this cover gives a proper judgment about the content inside. Hence, the title tag has to represent what the content inside the page contains.

The most important thing is to be precise and to the point in your titles because you need to capture the user’s attention. You can focus on using primary and secondary keywords to develop a good title tag followed by a brand name, for example, if you were a part of the marketing team at Takeout and wanted to optimize your local SEO, you could use the tag, ” Burgers in Dhaka | Takeout burgers.”

Points to remember:

1. A title tags needs to be between 50 and 60 characters.
2. The title tag should contain some important keywords to highlight it, preferably in the front.
3. If your brand is not that well-known, it is best to keep its name at the end of the tag. And if your brand name is more recognizable, then you should keep its name at the beginning of the tag.
4. The tags should be easily readable and such that it evokes emotions to draw people towards its content.

2. Clean URL

A clean URL is the kind that can easily be understood and recognized by the human eye. If it is complicated, it cannot draw people’s attention.

So, a bad URL would look like this, for example, “example.com/store/prodid=284&cmp=01905

What this URL should have looked like to be a “clean” URL is:

example.com/store/womens-dresses/white-satin-dress.

This URL is a better version because it clearly mentions what sort of product it is that the website is selling, that is, “women’s dresses” and specifies the characteristics that the user might be looking for, that is, a “white satin” dress. Hence, this provides the search engines a better idea of what the page is all about.

Points to remember:

1. URLs should have a maximum of 2048 characters because URLs that are longer than this limit cannot be processed by some older browsers.
2. You can separate words in the URL using hyphens to make it easy to read by both users and search engines.
3. Overdoing the hyphens will complicate the URL and spam your URLs. So, it is best to avoid that.
4. It is better to limit parameters to two or less for the same reason as is mentioned in (3).

3. Duplicate Content

You will find numerous websites that display the same or similar products, making it quite hard to stand out in the search engine results. Hence, search engines try to bring in diversity in the results. Users tend to have poor experiences when the same page is referenced multiple times within the results. That is what is knownas duplicate content.

Every search engine, due to the poor user experience it provides, looks down upon duplicate content. If a person were to, for example, look up golf gear on a search engine, he or she will expect a variety of options to search for. So, he or she will want different sorts of articles based on this topic. But if the user is presented with identical pieces of writing, it will not be of any help to him or her.

Because of complaints against this practice, duplicate content can now lead to being penalized in order to ensure that all duplicate content is removed or not presented to users. Users now use a robots.txt to hide duplicate content from the search engines.

Since it is very important to maintain some criteria while writing content for maximum response out of your local SEO, it is important to remember the following points:

1. The ideal size of content for each page is about 800-1500 words.
2. It is important to emphasize quality over quantity, especially when it comes to the keywords.
3. The content should be easily readable. To that end, you can add keywords with rich headings such as H1 and H2 tag to create sections for more legibility.
4. In order to make the keyword appear more in the search, you should use the key words 2 to 55 times in the same page, depending on the size of the content. You can also add different synonyms or alterations of the same keywords to gain more traffic.
5. You can avoid duplicate content and its penalties by using plagiarism checking websites or applications such as Copyscape. Such sites do an audit on your content to break down whether any of your content has been copied from or similar to existing content on the web.

4. Logos & Images

In order to get the most out of your SEO, your logo as well as the images included in your page should also be optimized. Images are a great way to draw attention to your page. So, the more eye-catching your images are, the more likely it is for users to click on your content.

Search engines do not, however, process images. They only rely on the title of the images to give users an idea about what that particular picture is about.

The images you put in your content should have a relevant filename, which uses keywords to give a proper idea about the image.  For example, white_satin_dress.jpg gives a clear message that it is an image of a white colored dress that is of satin material. This is much better than putting a bunch of letters and numbers in the title, because it is more straightforward and self-explanatory.

Title text or Alt text is probably the most part of optimizing your images in SEO. Alt text, also known as alternative text, is a word or phrase that you can add as an attribute in an HTML document to show the nature of an image or to show the contents of it. The alt text will appear on the image in case the image appears blank.

Using a proper Alt text is important because many users tend to stop the image loading if it takes too much time or data. Therefore, through alt text, you will be able to let the users know what the image is about.

Besides the title, it is also important to scale and resize your images. This is necessary because if your image size is too big, the entire file size will end up being huge as well. This will cause delays in loading times for your pages. Such delays have been known to be one of the leading reasons behind users clicking off on a page. So, you should never leave a photo without resizing it to go with your content.

To do that, you should resize and maintain the aspect ratio. You can also crop the image for better view of what is relevant in the image. It is important to convey exactly what is relevant to your content and to ensure that it successfully communicates the main message of your content.

It is not necessary to save the images in the highest quality photo format. You can resize an 8MB image to about 800KB. These lower quality JPG files are better for the web. You can also use logos of monochromatic colors or screenshots as PNGs or GIFs.

Images do not always require captions, but you can add one to your image to give a proper description of what the image is about. Captions can be utilized by using them as the data to be scanned by search engines to provide search results. So, as long as captions are relevant to your images and content, it can help with your SEO.

Images make all the difference in loading time of your page. Higher the loading time is, the worse the experience is for the user. Therefore, if you do not want to drive your visitors away, you should pay more attention to optimizing your images.

5. Non-www to www

Some web users use both www.xyz.com and xyz.com as their websites. However, making both non-www and Www webpages accessible to people can lead to creation of duplicate content and, in turn, penalty for duplication.

What you can do is, since people could look up both of the web versions, you could use a redirect like 301 redirect to permanently send users and search engines to a different URL, that is, the www version of your website every time anybody clicks on the non-www version.

There are different ways to create a 301 redirect depending on the web host you’re using. So, based on the host you have, you can set up your redirect. In most cases, all there is to do is set up an .htaccess.

The basic procedure you can use to redirect your non-www site to your www version is:

1. First, you have to open up a text editor like Notepad.
2. Now, you can copy the following line of code and paste it in the Notepad by writing your domain name in place of http://www.example.com/ and example.com.

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example.com

RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

3. Lastly, you have to save the file as .htaccess and later upload the file to your web.

If you have any special configurations of your host, you might need to find solutions different from this to set up the redirect.

6. Index-able Menus

All the content on your website can amount to unlimited menus or lists of data. So, to make the content visible to search engines and users both, you can use indexable menus to specify and order your content. This will help in achieving rankings that reflect phrases from your content.

The content of the page, along with the menus, should be in HTML text format so that it can display the page correctly. Search engines cannot scan menus that are in flash, Java applets etc. So, it is better to ensure that your menus are indexable.

You can do that by using a site like SEO-Browser.com because it allows you to view the content on your site as the search engine view it.

7. NAP

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. It is very important to insert these pieces of information properly when creating your page in Google My Business.

You have to make sure that the NAP of your business that is displayed on your main website is not different from the one you entered in your Google My Business. They need to be consistent.

It is really important to maintain this consistency in order to make your page be found and ranked high up in the search results on top of your competition. The slightest amount of inconsistency can lead to major effects in your overall ranking.

It legitimizes your business across the web and enables the website to bring more traffic and more leads.

So, it is highly important to ensure that your NAP is uniform and not different across every channel throughout the Internet. This is not only for your own site, but also, on sites recommended by service provider as well as on any citation sites that you have.

8. City/Service Page

Some businesses provide the same or different services in multiple cities. Such businesses have to maintain much tailored communication for every city. So, they need to ensure a separate page for each city or service.

Not only that, the content within these pages must be unique as well. That is the most important thing to consider here. Just as the other pages, these pages should also make sure that it contains the key words consistently.

It is recommended that the content on these pages range between 300 to 500 words and that it is easy to understand. The quantity is not the only key here. You need to deliver valuable content to attract an audience. Therefore, city-based content can provide more uniqueness within the content. Instead of targeting to create more content, it is better to target content that is more valuable.

You can categorize the services you offer if you do offer different kinds of services or products. You also need to ensure proper title tags on city/service pages to provide an idea of what you are offering. For example, if you are providing tailoring services in a certain area, you have to mention it in the title tag to make it clear.

9. Blog

Blogs are one of the best ways to attract a higher organic traffic to your website. However, maintaining a blog is very important and it requires constant monitoring and updates of new content. Therefore, it can require a lot of investment of time. However, due to ability to attract search engine spiders, it is considered a very beneficial investment for any business.

So, how do blogs consistently bring traffic?

Since blogs have to be updated consistently, the continuous action in your website draws the attention of the search engine spiders to your online presence. So, the more frequently you upload content to your site, the more search engines will notice and, thus, lead to more people to visit your site.

A blog helps a business in the following ways:

1. Content from blogs that are geared towards target visitors can warm up those people towards your business.
2. Business that maintain blogs are able to attract customers better than business that do not.
3. Blog provides a space for web users and potential or actual customers to give feedback to the business’ products and services.
4. Blogs make content that meet the needs of online searchers. So, search engines are more likely to push sites that are structured that way.

10. Mobile Responsive

The impact of mobile devices is undeniable in this day and age of smartphones and the internet. So, to take advantage of this huge network, it is important to incorporate the mobile systems into your SEO. You can do that by ensuring that the users that visit your site from mobile devices have an experience optimized for the device.

A huge portion of visitors of your website make queries about products and services found locally through their mobiles. Therefore, making your website mobile responsive is very important. The first step to make your site mobile responsive is to make it mobile-friendly.

Making your website responsive and mobile-friendly means to make the site design, site structure, page speed, and more suitable for your mobile devices. Websites thus have to design their content in such a way that it can account for the different screen sizes and load times of mobile devices.

It is necessary to ensure access to mobile from any environment. This means, the display on the website should be such that it looks functional and appealing no matter where you view it.

Besides this, it is important to know that the ranking for mobile devices is different from that of the desktop. Google even claims to penalize websites that are not mobile friendly. Hence, websites that have no mobile responsiveness can cause lower rankings in search results.

Google My Business is a platform that acts as a phonebook with all the businesses that run in a particular area. Basically, when you set up your profile in GMB listings, your profile is what will appear in the search results.

Your GMB profile is very important to focus on because it allows you to make information about your business accessible across different channels such as, Google Maps.  You can run your business using this profile to interact with potential customers, which will further solidify your local SEO ranking.

For example, if you have a beauty parlor business, you have to use certain localized keywords so that when someone looks up any beauty parlor in your area, your business profile comes forward. Moreover, since it can also show your location in Google maps, customers can easily figure out how far your shop is and how to get to you.

In order to set up your GMB listing, there are some points to consider, as follows:

1. If your GMB Listing has been claimed

At first, you have to check the GMB Console to look for your business. You will probably find a lot of listings to choose from. Choose the one that is the most accurate for your business. Butthere is a chance that someone else could have claimed your listing. In that case, there is no need to worry.

You can follow these guidelines to deal with this issue:

Start by searching for the username and password associated with the listing. You can look for the emails that you received on your personal and official Gmail accounts. You should be able to find what your GMB login is.
If you still cannot figure it out, what you can do is contact contractors or consultants that you have been associated with past to get the logins and passwords from them. It is possible that your marketing consultant claimed the listing on your behalf and forgot to share the details.

If you are still facing trouble, then it is advisable that you contact Google My Business Support to help you resolve it.

2. If your business is Unclaimed on GMB

When you try to claim a listing, you will first be redirected to a Google Maps page. You can search for your business there and after finding it, you have to verify that it is yours. For that, you need to check the “I am authorized to manage this business” and “I agree to the Terms of Service” boxes and then click on the “Continue” button. You might have to verify by post, phone or text. After that is done, you will be given the instructions that will tell you how to claim your Google My Business listing.

In case you cannot find your business among the listings, you can simply click the “None of these match – Add your business” button.

3. Completing Your Google My Business Listing

After claiming your Google My Business listing, the next thing you have to do is optimize your profile. To do that, you can use the following steps:

a. Enter Your Business Name – It is important to follow the guidelines given by Google in this section. Make sure that the information you provide is relevant and applicable. You do not have to add, say, LLC, Inc, Corporation or any other special characters here.

b. Enter an Accurate Address – You have to be very precise in inputting your address because your business can be rejected for any inconsistencies, such as adding your PO Box, something that is not permitted. You can add a service area for your business and have the ability to hide it later.

c. Enter a Primary Phone Number – This part is very important because it deals with customer service and facilitating sales calls. Besides a primary contact number, you have the option to add a secondary phone number. It is important to remember that using toll-free numbers might diminish your chances to rank higher. Therefore, it is best to avoid that.

d. Enter your website – Insert your website information correctly and ensure that the website you are providing is running properly beforehand. You will find many visitors coming to your website through clicking this very link that you are providing. And this will help people to discover more about your business.

e. Choose an appropriate category – Google will provide a lot of suggestions in choosing the most appropriate category for your business. And it is very important to make sure that the category you choose is accurate.

There are a few options here, such as, a “brand”, which does not fall under local businesses, a “storefront” that is a retail store, restaurant, gym, hotel etc., and lastly, a “service area,” which refers to a service-based business like plumbing, delivery system, taxi service and so on.

You have to choose the exact category among these options. If you find it difficult to choose which option will be more appropriate, you can take help from Google, which will help you by providing a drop down that will allow you to choose the closest match.

For example, if you have a dental business, you should not choose “doctor’s office” as your category. Otherwise, any potential customer will not be able to discover your page.

If you cannot find the right category for your business, what you can do is look out for business that have the most similar keywords to your page and rank the highest. This can act as a guide for you to decide which to choose.

f. Enter Hours – Entering hours means entering the time that your business will be open. That is, your usual opening and closing hours. Your business can have special hours on some occasions. In that case, it is necessary to mention that as well.

g. Add Photos – Your GMB profile will contain two sections for photos: the “Preferred Photo” section and simply “Photo” section. The former is for your primary business images, that is, your logo and cover image. The latter is for any other additional photos that you might want to add.  

Although Google + can support photos with 2120×1192 pixels, the photos should, in general, have a deal size of about 1080×608. In case if your cover binge and your logo or profile photo, the bigger size it is, the better. This is because you need to be able to draw attention to the photo even when it is displayedon large settings.

The smallest size you can set for the cover image is 480×270 and for logos is 250×250. Any smaller than that will make the photos deteriorate in quality. The profile photo, that is the logo, should be in a square.

h. Add a Description – The description on your profile should contain around 1200-2000 characters that provides a very precise idea about your business. This section needs to be to the point with a sort of call for action so that it gains more traction.

3. Do You Follow All of Google’s Guidelines?

Google has its own set of guidelines that advises you on how to set up your SEO. Following those guidelines is very important when you are optimizing your Google My Business profile. Their guide should give you a list of do’s and don’ts, which can help you to give visitors exactly what they’re looking for while making sure that your website is accessible to all potential customers.  

Hence, we recommend going through each guideline to understand the things to do and avoid, and to make sure that your profile is consistent with them.

If you are finding it difficult to understand or find the guidelines, you can check out Google’s support site, Synup’s website, or even different blogs that tell you how to create your profile step-by-step. These sites will aid you in figuring out the common mistakes that most people make when optimizing their website. And so, it will guide you through the entire process of set up and optimization.  

5. Indoor street view of your business

Indoor Street View basically allows your potential customers to ‘see inside’ your shop. Thus, they can pay a virtual visit to your store. This brings an entirely new dimension to your business that can attract visitors with no hassle at all.

Google offers what they call a ‘Trusted Photographer’ whose job is to create and publish this virtual experience for visitors. What they do is shoot pictures of the interiors of your shop and then create an immersive virtual tour of it.

This measure truly completes your profile while, at the same time, prompting potential visitors to become customers having had a little taste of it virtually.

6. Identifying & Eliminating Duplicates

Besides creating and optimizing your GMB profile, it is important to focus on removing any duplicate business listings that can be found in Google’s index. Such duplicates can not only pose a problem for search engines in deciding which listing to include or exclude in search rankings, but also be detrimental to your business since it can affect your site’s search visibility.

So, to prevent such listings from affecting your SEO, you can follow the given guidelines:

1. To identify duplicate listing, you can search in the Google My Business console to see if there are any existing listing under the same location or business name as yours.
2. If you add a location and it appears as ‘Duplicate Listing’ or ‘Duplicate Location’, it means that someone else has already claimed it. Having identified this, the first thing you need to do is clarify the information that you want to add to your listing pertinent to that particular location or listing.
3. Then, you have to seek help from the support portal in Google My Business where you must explain your situation. If you can verify that it is your own listing, then they should remove the duplicate immediately.
4. In case of duplicate locations, you can sign into your GMB profile and go to ‘Account Summary’ to specify which locations you want to remove for being duplicates.

If you still face trouble in eliminating duplicates, I would recommend checking out an excerpt from the expert’s guide to Local SEO at Moz.com.

Citations are basically mentions of your business name, address or website anywhere across the internet, whether it be on directories, association pages or government websites. It is a very significant part of your SEO profile because studies have shown that 13% of all the factors that influence your search rankings is citations alone.  

It is important to note that citations will have a positive impact on your SEO results only if they are consistent. This means that the citations that mention details about your business should always be the same.

Inconsistencies like using different addresses in different citations will make it useless because then the rankings will not be consistent either. In addition, differing citations can be confusing to customers leading to a poor experience. So, to improve your business credibility and to allow customers to be able to reach you through any channel, it is necessary to provide accurate citations.  

To get higher ranks on search engines, you need citations from authoritative websites. It is recommended that you target high quality and high-ranking websites to provide citations. This means having mentions in well-established news articles, blogs and more that are found in your city’s business index.

This is important because search engines prefer to push content from such well-indexed sites. So, such strong citations can help people discover your site more easily, thus, helping your site getting higher search ranking as well.  

It is even more important to improve your listings if the industry you work in do not typically use websites for information. Because the, your site could be one of the few sources of information for the services that you provide.

1. Top Citation Sites

It is important to be listed on high-ranking sites like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Yelp, Foursquare, Bing and so on. Other notable directories that are impactful to your SEO are your local Chamber of Commerce, YellowPages, Whitepages, Superpages, and Manta etc. You can also get yourself listed based on the category of listing that you fall under. For that, you can look up Moz.com for the top citation sites. For example, if you own a coffee shop, you need listings from sites like Yelp.com and urbanspoon.com.

2. Fix Listings

Data has shown that 73% web users lose interest in websites when they find inaccurate information about the business. To protect your online presence, it is, thus, very important to provide correct information to customers and visitors that may seek products or services from you.

You will have to deal with handling huge volumes of data to maintain your site. So, to keep track of your listing, you need to provide consistent information throughout the web. You can take help from sites like Synup to scan your business listed on the internet to detect inconsistencies.

In order to identify and fix any incorrect information that you may have in your listing, you must regularly monitor the data you’re pushing out. .

Some of the commonly found errors in listings are:

Name – Using different versions of the business name eg. ‘’Sweet café’’ and “Sweet coffee” may be similar but is considered an inconsistency.

Address – Forgetting to update old addresses or use incorrect format

Phone numbers – Forgetting to update old or outdated phone numbers, etc.

3. Niche Specific

Niche specific directories are websites that includes links to different companies from certain niches. This means that they focus on particular industries or sectors to mention.

Since such directories are targeted at a specific audience, if you can earn a link in one of these directories relevant to your business, you can directly cater your information to customer segments that are specifically looking for products or services that you provide.

You can search for niche specific directories by searching the keywords relevant to your business along with “directory”. Some popular niche specific sites are:

Car Dealersautotrader.com, cars.com, carsforsale.com

Hotelstripadvisor.com, hotels.com, expedia.com

Restaurantsurbanspoon.com opentable.com

Finding such directories is very important to generate traffic to your business site because many customers value the content provided in these sites. It narrows down search information from millions of results to a specific list in specific categories. Hence, it is very convenient for users in finding what they are looking for.

4. Hyperlocal Citations

Hyperlocal citations are similar to niche specific citations, except that, it is not only niche specific but also location specific. Such citations can help to improve your search rankings in local areas.

Hyperlocal citations include features in local newspapers or country/community specific directories or blogs. These mentions are very important to build engagement with your community and to improve credibility of your business.

In order to get mentions in such directories, what you need to do is be present within your community and participate in it offline. Participations include hosting events inviting fellow denizens, sponsoring a local team, or engaging with the locality in any way that highlights your company. Such activities can create publicity for you in the form of mentions in local newspapers and blogs. Thus, it can lead to visibility in search results too.

You can also optimize your online profile for hyperlocal search by adding any running promotion, pictures, videos, menus, working hours, etc. This can help to improve your profile and help customers to discover your content. All of this can take a lot of time and effort, but it is definitely worth it!

You can take guidelines from searchenginepeople.com for a step-by-step guide.

5. Competitor Citations

You need to keep a close eye on your competitors’ activities when you’re trying to make your business visible. When it comes to SEO, it is important to note where your competitors’ listings are being cited and figure out how you can do the same. Because you need to be able to keep up with them, if not exceed them, to get higher search ranks.

You have to use their sources to ensure that you have covered every channel as well. You can do so by following the given steps:

You can look for your competitors’ NAP on Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines to find all their citations. You can use sites like localseochecklist.org to find a list of citations across the web.
You can also reverse image search your competitors’ images such as their logos, cover images, mascots, any promotional material, etc. using Google Image Reverse Search to see their source. You can also use a tool like Ahrefs to find all the backlinks they have to their site.

6. Modify Old Citations

It is important to continually update and optimize your GMB profile. You can do so by modifying your old or outdated citations every now and then. This ensures your credibility as a business across the web.

If you happened to change your address or phone number or any other vital information, you need to modify it across every site where you may have used the information or been cited. Otherwise, it can create inconsistencies that can lower your SEO ranking.

You can use tools like Synup to find all the citations of your business and claim or change it accordingly. Sites where you cannot directly claim your citations may require you to contact them. Besides this, to ensure that any old NAPs are not floating in the web, you can look it up yourself in various new places for your citations.

7. Bing Places

Google is not the only search engine that allows you to enlist your business in their index. Bing does so too and have many loyal followers at that as well. So, if you have not already created your business listing in Bing, you definitely should. It can give you a unique advantage that your competitors may not have taken advantage of just because Google is the leading search engine.

Bing places is very similar to Google my business in allowing you to manage your services locally. It can let you add up to 10,000 new client locations. Their comprehensive dashboard shows the total number of business listings submitted as well as the total number of business listings published along with the reviewed and suspended sites.

8. Yelp

Yelp is a very well-known platform that can boost your business using your citations. Yelp basically publishes crowd-sourced reviews about various local business, their products and/or services.

Yelp has different categories ranging from education, beauty, healthcare, school to auto motives and local services or industry-specific like schools, restaurants etc. Customers and visitors are given the ability to write reviews on these businesses under each categories.

Yelp has a huge user base and is the one of the biggest review sites out there, because it was able to give a voice to people virtually. The fact that this site is so open and have a great outreach is exactly what attracts people to come to this site to share their opinions and reviews on different places.

It has a simple five star rating system to evaluate products and places, which makes it easy for the people to understand. It also offers a sort of social networking site, where you can “Find Friends”, “Message”, and “Talk” etc. It has quickly become a community for reviewers and so, is a great place to have a citation mentioned in.

9. Data Aggregators

Data aggregation is a data mining system that collects and spreads business information online with search engines like Google itself. Information from these tools are used for statistical analyzation, observations, extrapolations and variable studies.

Data aggregators are basically operators aggregate data, process it, break it down into comprehensible statistical pieces for you. They share these pieces with various search engines and business directories for their publishing.

Some of the top data aggregators out there include:

Acxiom

Acxiom is one of the most powerful data aggregator that have the ability to work with large amounts of data. They manage more than 4000 databases and update 10 billion records every month.

Acxiom is clearly one of the biggest players in this field as its notable partners include Facebook, Adobe, Cisco, eBay, IBM and Microsoft etc. allowing it to occupy a huge market share.

Since this is a huge data aggregator, it is important for your business to add your listing on their database.


Neustar Localeze

Neustar Localeze is another very well-known data aggregator that distributes data to more than 100 search platforms, apps and systems including big shot sites such as Yahoo!, Nokia etc.

This platform should not be underestimated as well because it is this provider that allows Nokia to give real-time data in its in-car navigation system.

Factual

Factual is another platform that aims to provide data in real time to its partner platforms. They work with impressive partners like Yelp, Adelphic, Cadreon, BMW, Inmobi and Apple.

In less than two years, this company has been able to provide and maintain data from more than 100 million local business in over 50 countries. They are trusted source of information due to its accuracy and the consistency of data.

Infogroup

Infogroup is last but definitely not the least in this list. This company provides high value data for businesses and consumers all around the world. They have a specialty in dealing with bulk data, which can be accessible through a number of websites such as infoUSA.com, Salesgenie.com, onesourse.com and more.

This company also provides multi-channel marketing solutions as well as appropriate bulk listings, which make it easy for your business to deal with changes or inconsistencies.

It is important to know that associating yourself with the biggest data aggregators is not enough. Consistency is the ley all the way. If there are inconsistencies on one platform at all, it can mess up you entire algorithm in SEO.

Links found on the internet form a relationship between search engines and websites, more importantly between customers and marketers. Link building is the process of getting external pages to link to a page on your website. When a well-established and authoritative website links to your website, it immediately reflects positively on your SERP and page rankings.

There are several great ways to build links, locally. There is a direct correlation between high quality links and your page rank. When a random website links to your website through an irrelevant keyword, Google picks up on it, and that directly translates into lower page ranks. Say you own a restaurant and that you’recompeting with a bunch of restaurants, one factor that Google takes into consideration while ranking your pages will be the amount of instances where external pages have linked to your websites. Depending on the credibility of these external pages, you will be considered for ranking on SERPs.

Local Businesses and Link Building

Link building is very important to all kinds of businesses and local link building is a part of it. If you are trying to boost your visibility and presence on the web, one great way is to get local external pages to link to a page on your website. Local link building matters because geolocation changes Google keyword rankings 69% of time according to a study conducted by Linkdex.

Link building will translate into Google boosting your SERPs, especially if the search is localized. If you build local links, say for example, for your plumbing business in Los Angeles, California, Google search will churn out your website first when it comes to localization of searches. So,if your customer searches “plumbers in Los Angeles”, your website will likely show up in the top resuts on SERP, if you build enough trustworthy local links.

Link building is very important to all kinds of businesses and local link building is a part of it. If you are trying to boost your visibility and presence on the web, one great way is to get local external pages to link to a page on your website. Local link building matters because geolocation changes Google keyword rankings 69% of time according to a study conducted by Linkdex.

Link building will translate into Google boosting your SERPs, especially if the search is localized. If you build local links, say for example, for your plumbing business in Los Angeles, California, Google search will churn out your website first when it comes to localization of searches. So,if your customer searches “plumbers in Los Angeles”, your website will likely show up in the top resuts on SERP, if you build enough trustworthy local links.

How Do I Get This Done?

Local link building opportunities arise easily: you can convert anything and everything into an opportunity to build a local link. The relevance in local link building centers more on location rather than niche. Needless to say, it will definitely do a great deal of good for your business if both your niche/industry and your location shows a high degree of relevance to your business. However, with local link building, it has more to do with focusing on geo-proximity and the impact of that when it comes to your presence and visibility. There are a variety of local link building strategies that work for local businesses, and some of them include:

1. Local Interaction

Know your community, make sure that you know all the stakeholders on a local level. Establish connections based on their proximity. The most important part here is investing time, local happy customers lead to a fast word-of-mouth which in turn leads to easy and faster link building. You can do a range of activities that deal with local interaction; host a local event, interview a locally famous personality, sponsor an event for local charity, etc.

2. Community Resources

Building a host of community resources will reflect on your encounter with localization. If your website lacks community resources, that shows the absence of local interaction. Community resources will ensure that you get a fair share of visitors for your local links and that your community will be aware of your presence. Create something useful that doesn’talready exist for your community, that way you will be able to generate a fair share of public interest. Say, for instance, youown a grocery store and your community does not have a place where organic goods are sold, put together a map where organic goods are available within your area.This will prove very contextual and useful for your local link building process.

3. Join Local Directories

If there are any area-specific directories that promote small businesses, do join them. These directories offer you a good presence and will make sure that your local area comes into the picture. Finding local sites within your community that also hosts a good share of local resources can definitely be your answer for link building. Look into local government databases, directories,city council websites, local newspapers etc.

There are ample opportunities to build links, locally. The key lies in engaging with your community and tapping into what could possibly be useful for your community. Every chance is a way to build links locally. You can check out more ideas for local link building, here.

Leveraging the Power of Local Citation

Citations contain the name of your business and address of your business in other web pages , irrespective of whether the web page is linked to your website or not. These citations can be found on local directories, online databases etc. This is largely relevant to your local business because if your business is listed on local directories, it gives you credibility. Create a unique description for each citation, but be sure to keep your NAP uniform, all across the web.If you use the power of your citation, you can greatly improve your local link building, thereby improving your online visibility and presence.

When it comes to localization, you can get listed on these 5 different types of sites:

Data-aggregators (e.g. LocalEze).

Horizontal directories (e.g. Yelp).

Industry-specific directories (e.g. Avvo for lawyers).

Region-specific sites (e.g. Denver.com/places).

Sites where you can get an “unstructured” citations, like a mention in a newspaper or a mention by a “local” blogger.

Local citations increase your prominence, local prominence, especially. When it comes to search results, localization will give you an edge over the others for it will link up with local link building. Local citations increase your visibility and online presence, especially considering that Google filed a patent on scoring local search results based on location prominence.

Search Engine Queries Used for Local Link Building Campaign You can use endless terms to build links locally. Local link building involves familiarizing yourself with your community, and engaging, interacting and being proactive with the same. There are directions that can help you build local links, effectively, in this case they are called search queries. Using these keyword rich search queries, you can build local links.

Find industry resources

Find sites where you can list your website

Find non-profit organizations which accepts donations Find websites to promote your tools, badges, widgets & infographics for link building

Find blogs which review products Find websites which review products

Find Industry Specific Q & A

Find blogs which accept sponsored/paid reviews Find Industry Specific Social Profiles Find Industry Specific Events

For example, after finding blogs which review products similar to your offering ( #5 ), you can approach them- drop them an email and ask them to review your product, while offering them something in return. That way you can be sure of building long lasting local links.

Geo Anchor Text

Geo-targeting helps you out when it comes to localization specifically. With backlinks, it is common knowledge that Google uses the backlinks to determine rankings. Sure, including your physical address, state, country or your location can help your business turn up on localized results. But think of including geo-tagging in everything on your page- contextual and physical.

Contextual- When you’re building local links, make sure to link it to pages that contain your geo wavelength. Say, you’rea restaurant owner and you’re writing a recipe on how to make chicken pasta, the link to purchase good organic pasta can be linked to a local grocery store’s website which is nearby to your location. So, Google knows that you’re definitely based on that location and you’re referring to other establishments, so it will definitely pick up on the stability and credibility of your location.

Physical- If the physical address on your website is highly relevant to your local link building, imagine if you are mentioned in other websites which display the same geo-proximity as you do. Your businesses might not even be in the same category, but that does not matter. The fact that a source that’s close to you geographically, lists you on their website can do a lot of good for our link building. Say, you own a grocery shop, you can walk up to a hardware store nearby and ask them to add a link to your web-page, in return you can mention them on your website. Google picks this up as a cluster while confidently establishing that the geographical locations are the same, thereby boosting your relevance, which in turn shows up in SERP’s and page ranking.

You can also base your domain off of a particular country-say, www.abcd.hk – this a great indication as it indicates that your business is based off of Hongkong.

Geo anchors are a great way to enhance your local link building process. To get a more comprehensive outlook on what geo anchoring could mean for your website, click here.

In Conclusion

Local link building is completely about finding local authorities, building a relationship with all your local stakeholders, engaging in positive interactions and bringing your relationships into the online world. How far you want to take it is fully dependent upon how much you want to invest, your current level of involvement with your community, and how important local is to your business.

1. Negative Reviews

There’s no scope of ignoring negative reviews. Negative reviews should be handled in such a way, so that, it resembles a professional manner and a deep care towards the customers.

Therefore, you must not get emotional towards them. Rather, you should make them realize that you care for your customers and hence, you are accepting all their negative comments and trying your best to improve. Informality is also sometimes necessary to make your customers know that, you are not just a

faceless brand but you’re a human business.

Everyone knows that not all negative reviews are dubious. It is the repetitive response you provide that will give your prospective customer the insights they need to find out about you. It will help them to decide whether they will be moving forward with your business or with a competitor’s one.

If you respond to them rudely or, in the worst case, not responding at all, be sure that your customers will never want to pay a visit to your store again. People will be really appreciative if they finds that you gave extra efforts and accepted all their negative comments with a happy heart.

2. Generating Reviews

A healthy and positive spotlight on the business can be maintainedby generating reviews. One thing mentionable about online reviews is that unless they are coaxed, they seem negative because they’renot encouraged.

There are some people who start writing negative reviews when they’re angry. But, not many people feel the urge to write positive reviews unless the service is oh-so-amazing.

That’s why you must encourage reviews and some ways to do that are mentioned below:

Provide excellent service and support and blow them away.
Follow the method of simply asking. Example; Send an email and ask your customers for reviews (but give them something as well–don’t just take).
Focus on increasing customer loyalty.
Keep your social media profiles up to date. You can even ask from there as well if you’d feel like.
Start grabbing attention by putting a pop-up on your website. But, make sure that, it is not done in their every search.
Encourage people to visit your review page by displaying posters with links or embedded QR codes.
Run check-in offers. Example: An incentive (20% off or free coffee) can hopefully turn your customers into a positive reviewer.

3. Be Easy to Review

Give your customers enough comfort zones to review you. Have a web page and show people what they should do. Send out an email to them with well-defined steps on how their review would getposted to the site of your choice. Print a handout and explain well about what one should do in order to review your business.

Don’t put up so many barriers into play. It is fortunate that, the review process is typically very easy. But encouragement is necessary and if you have a specific targeted network, make sure they know which network it is and what they need to do in order to post there.

1. Call to Action

The main aim of your website should be to convert a user into a customer. This indicates that, everything on your page must attract and lead a user to click your CTA. Over years of internet usage, people have become more conditioned (think of Pavlov’s experiment) to discover and click a CTA when they end up on a landing page.

You can attract your visitors and make them click on a CTA just to satisfy their needs by arousing their curiosity in what you have to offer. Your CTA must be a stand out from the rest and should have copy that intrigues your visitors.

There are a number of design principles to consider while creating CTAs. But, the most effective design can only be determined through a lot of A/B testing. Keep trying and play with colors, shapes and sizes to see which combination works for your purpose and suits the most.

2. Phone Number

Another important aspect of any website is that, it provides a direct connection for you and your customers. Your phone number is the best way in this regard to take the conversion process offline and straight back to your hands.

Make sure that your phone number is visible on each page of your website. This will help the visitors to clear out any of their rising confusions by simply giving you a call. This way, you can easily sell your products with the very personal touch of your’s that your website might lack. Also, if a user takes the time to call you, it indicates he is interested in what you have to say. You can use this as your advantage to identify the potential customers from the rest.

Another great thing about this phone number is that, you can enable “Click to Call” option on it. This will make it easier for mobile users to call you straight from your page. By enabling this feature, you can bring in more customers from your site to your doorsteps.

Ensure that your phone number matches the zip code of your locality. It is one of the very important aspects to be consideredabout which phone number to choose as your official business number. While searching for a business in a particular location, potential customers expect the two to match and so do Google guidelines. You might be penalized if you don’t follow this particular rule and you might even notice a drop in your rankings.

3. Testimonials

Testimonials are a fantastic way to highlight what your customers really love about your business. Customers feel safer buying a product when they see that product gets approval from their peers. Knowing that their peers have used your product and are satisfied with it, can have a significant impact on getting visitors to your site interested in your services.

You can directly obtain the testimonials and use them on your website from your own customers (in text or, video form). It might even be taken from the reviews on other websites such as Yelp, Facebook, etc. You can also decide whether you want a page dedicated to just testimonials, or if you just want a few great ones placed on a landing page or have them on certain pages.

Having testimonials on a landing page helps to increase conversions. It’s recommended to use detailed reviews mentioning how your product or service has helped better your customers’ lives, rather than just showing up generic compliments.

In fact, simple and positive reviews like “Great Product!” can put a negative impact on your prospects because they don’t help much to convince a potential customer that, your product or service is great and superior to others.

There are a good number of social media platforms that you can use to boost your business. Might be in terms of rankings and listings or, even just your online presence. However, at this stage, we are going to explore four major social media platforms that will help your SEO – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.

1. Facebook

Facebook consists of a huge part of the World Wide Web. Globally it’s the 3rd most visited website just after Google and YouTube. It’sprobably the most happening place on the World Wide Web when you take it into consideration about the amount of activity that takes place on Facebook. Since, Facebook has grown so much and is now considered as a crucial SEO influencer so, it’s better to start your online business here.

At the very beginning, you simply must have a Facebook page. The title of your page must match with your web URL. Your customers will not get confused or misled if there is consistency in the title and the website URL.

Facebook also allows you in choosing a suitable business category when you sign up. You can narrow down your business niche by using the subcategories. So, don’t stop at “news and publications” if you are a sports publication. Rather, dive a bit deeper into the subcategories and make sure that, you’ve picked “sport”.

This will help you to reach the targeted customers by being more precise and clear about your business. This also ensures quicker filtering. Therefore, it becomes easy for your customers to find you. Remember to put up a comprehensive write-up in the “About me” section. You must do this by using relevant keywords. The physical address of your store should be added here as well.

If you publish strong and original contents, your customers will become more attracted to your page and will start following. The amount of likes, shares and comments helps a lot in a good brand building. It is to be kept in mind that, Social Medias are all about engagement. So, try to engage your customers, ask them relevant questions, reply to their queries, solve their problems and take feedbacks wherever you can.

2. Twitter

Twitter is another great platform that you can hop onto immediately since, it can do wonders for your SEO.

You can capitalize on the power of mentions with the help of Twitter. A mention indicates the act of using @ to tag someone, to mention someone in a particular post, to make them notice your post or, even reply or comment on your post. All these gives birth to a broad category called “mentions” in Twitter.

These mentions together puts a huge impact on your page ranking as well as on your visibility. You can also tap into industry specific networking with these mentions, while you are maintaining a constant interaction with niche specific followers. You can make sure that your business is going to make some wonders with SEO by being constantly present and visible.

Username is known as “handle” in Twitter. It plays significant role to reflect your brand name and consistency. That’s why, make sure your Twitter handle is reflecting your brand and has a username set across all social media platforms. You must also ensure that your bio is filled with the appropriate keywords. Always keep it in mind that, your bio needs to be accurate, exciting, targeted, flattering, humanizing and intriguing.

3. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a well-known platform to use for your business. At the very first, it is very important for you to complete your profile. Make sure that, you don’t leave out any business details. You have to understand that a high degree of professionalism is reflected only with the help of a complete and an engaged profile.

You should claim your custom URL in order to make the full use of LinkedIn. You must make sure that, you do not have any inconsistent URL’s/usernames/handle spread everywhere on the web. You just have to pick one name and use the same version throughout the web.

LinkedIn gives another great advantage where you can join relevant groups and participate. LinkedIn offers industry specific advantages where you can tap and build a great level of engagement and interaction. High levels of engagement and interaction will boost your networking as well as increase your online presence and visibility.

LinkedIn also promotes a healthy two way bond. Recommendations and endorsements are two key features in this regard that, encompasses a huge part of LinkedIn, more specifically, industry specific contact building.

Endorsements are basically the votes of confidence and recommendations of the people which reflects their satisfaction generated by using your services. A well endorsed business, no doubt, always attracts more customers.

4. Instagram

Instagram is a very popular app amongst the youngsters of today and it boasts of around 800 million monthly active users. It’s a great platform to capitalize on and one of the very effective ways to engage and interact with your customers. It is a well-known fact that, Instagram believes “Pictures capture attention faster than words do”.

Instagram, with it’s regular photo content, has become a huge breeding ground for businesses and is attracting more and more customers. You can even create a business account and promote it to potential customers in your area with the help of Instagram.

You can ask your customers to tag your business when they are uploading photos of products that you sell. In return, you can give them discounts to get the word out on the street about your establishment.

Schema is basically a code that is used on websites to help search engines crawl and find information quickly. Schema.org was createdby the joint venture of Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! It had the aim to help people out to represent their information in the best way so that their search engines can understand it and provide the users with appropriate search results.

Including schema markup to a page enhances the way they are displayed in SERPs. Because they highlight the rich snippets shown under the page title. As a result, a structure for the data is created that can quickly be recalled by search engines for specific and relevant searches.

There are mainly 2 types of schema formats: JSON and Micro Data. Each of these has it’s own way of getting displayed on your site. But, search engines are always indifferent to which format you use.

Micro data schema is used for highlighting texts for search engines that can also be visible to users on your site. 51 Block helps you to generate JSON schema with this handy tool.

JSON is invisible to users but, visible to search engines. This is usedto make your pages more index-able and reduces the trouble of having clunky data on every page. In order to get different kinds of micro data formats, you can use Raven Tool’s Schema Creator.

1. Advantages of Using Schema Markup

There is no definite proof that completely supports the benefits of schema but, here are some ways that it can improve your SERPs visibility:

Your rich snippets will stand out for author and review schema markups.
Third party applications will be able to get your data in a structured format and can access whenever needed.
Schema helps to improve the way your information is collected and organized if your data gets integrated into applications.
Users find it easier to navigate to your site because schema helps them to check whether a particular result is what they’re actually looking for.

2. Check Available Schemas

Data markup can be done for almost everything. Example: Local businesses, articles, reviews, software applications, movies, products and so on. The type of schema you use is mainly determined by the kind of information you want to display on your site. This helps the SERPs categorize your site and provides users with the most relevant results.

There are many tools that can show your current schema markup if you really want to check your’s. There is the Schema Scanner that can check your whole site for schema markup while, Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool can help you out to check it page-wise.

It’s important to check your entire site for schema because it will ensure that, search engines understand your page. As a result, you will be better ranked for relevant searches.

2. Check Available Schemas

It’s necessary to know where to use what, when it comes to generating schema for content on your site. Now, let’s go over a few of the commonly used schema markups you’ll need for your business site.

a. Author schema

In order to define the authorship of a piece of content on a particular page, this schema markup is used.

b. Review schema

This is used to describe the ratings of a product, service or, establishment. It shows up as stars right below the title tag in the SERPs and also includes the review count. A user will be able to identify the quality of your product or, service by using this schema.

Some of the properties that can be included here are item Reviewed (the product or service that is to be reviewed), review Body and review Rating (the aggregated rating obtained).

c. Local Business schema

This kind of markup is used for identifying a business location or, a particular branch of a larger organization. It is usually used for restaurants, bank branch, professional practice etc.

The important properties under this schema are: opening Hours, price Range, payment Accepted, currencies Accepted, parent Organization and so on.

d. Industry specific

There are also some specific schema markups for certain industries under the local business category. Such as: Automotive Business, Childcare, Entertainment Business, Food Establishment, Health and Beauty Business, Home and Construction Business and Professional Services. The extensive list can later be found on schema.org.

All these different types of schema used on a page makes it easier to narrow down your business in to search engines in such a way that, they understand what exactly your site should rank for. It not only improves the experience of a user to obtain relevant results on SERPs but, also it helps businesses to get the right kind of traffic for conversion.

1. Google Webmasters

In order to gather intelligence about the performance of your website in search engines, sign up for an account on Google Webmaster Tools (WMT). With WMT, you will be able to do the followings:

a. Receive notifications of any type of messages or spam warnings and act upon them. Example: Unnatural links or, outages that may prevent Googlebot from accessing your site.

b. Review all the structured data, such as, schema elements. It also provides with suggestions for how to improve your HTML.

c. To set a geographic target, a preferred domain and a crawl rate. All of these are very important for a good SEO.

d. Demotes site link you do not want to appear in the search engine results.

e. Review basic site analytics and all the top search phrases.

f. View links both internally and externally that are pointed to your site.

g. Set geographic considerations for your website, if required.

f. Clean insights of your website on the mobile usability.

i. See the number of pages that are indexed by Google.

j. Learn and gather knowledge about the top content themes.

k. Discover resources that are blocked to search engines.

l. Remove URLs from the search engine results.

m. Review site errors. Example: DNS, connectivity of the server and robots.txt issues.

n. Gather data on the statistics of Google’s spider site crawl. You can also gather the format by which Google is accessing your content.

o. Review all your robots.txt and sitemap.xml files.

p. Configure URL parameters.

q. Access data on any type of existing security issues.

This is just the beginning. Google WMT also helps to link you to other resources necessary for your local businesses, such as, the structured data testing tool and Google My Business and as well as other resources such as Page Speed Insights and custom search.

2. Google Analytics

An even deeper look at your website’s visitors is provided by Google Analytics. It gathers data, such as, the number of visits you’re getting (returning and unique), the bounce rate, the pages they visit most often, the devices from which, they access your site, the geographic location of your visitors and a lot more. Google Analytics is a simple code (about 6-7 lines long). It is to be put on the header of all pages you intend to track. This will give you a plethora of insights.

But even more to this, you can also trace acquisition. Such as: How people are accessing your site, if they are visiting directly, if they are going through paid search, if they are coming through social mediasetc. All of this can be tied to conversion rates which you will be able to configure on your site especially if an e-commerce component is integrated into your website and goals are defined.