10 SEO tips that will help your local SEO rankings

If you want to rank your website for your local customers then you really need to know about local SEO.

It is very similar to traditional SEO yet there are things you can do to make sure that you are targeting the right type of local clients who are likely to use your services or buy your products.

Starting a local SEO campaign is a great way of getting quick wins with your marketing campaign and you should start to see the benefits fairly quickly whereas a traditional SEO campaign will take longer.

When you are doing local SEO you really have to take into account your target audience and their geographical location. Proximity to your business is the key to success when it comes to local SEO and the factors that go into determining how your website will ultimately rank. We get so many clients telling us that they want to rank locally. Whether they are dentists, doctors, lawyers, rubbish removers or accountants the request is still the same: ‘get us on Google maps and help us rank for our local suburb’. Think with Google tells us that 76% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day.

Following is a thorough list to help you start your local SEO

Obviously, we do recommend that you use our SEO services as you still need a company like ours to help with the backlinking process and help to push these rankings.

1. Define your area. Obviously, if you’re a lawyer who wants to attract customers from a wider area and more suburbs, the local SEO campaign will require more work as opposed to a single shop that attracts a very loyal client base. Pick your suburbs and make sure that you have a unique page on your website about each suburb and the type of services you can offer for this particular area. Again, be realistic. You can’t rank for hundreds of suburbs like you could in the past. Google will pick up on this if you try to fraudulently rank into too many areas that are simply not local.

2. Have a contact page on your website with a Google map and a phone number and address. Do not have more than one on this page unless an actual physical address exists in these other areas. You have to be practical about this as you don’t want local customers visiting other location that does not exist.

3. If you have a business in less than 10 suburban locations it’s OK to have these in the footer of the website.

4. This point is really important. Make sure you register with Google My Business, fill out the form and then verify it once you receive the notice from Google. This is a must! Make sure you also add relevant photos to this business page.

5. Make sure all your local pages are correctly optimised for local search. Titles should be” Your Local Plumbers in Bondi’ with the appropriate description to match.

6. Register your business with local directories such as yellow pages and other local directories. This will really help with Google Maps. These are known as citations and are a powerful way to help promote your business locally. Only do well-recognised directories and never over optimise this strategy with hundreds of useless directory listings.

7. Add some local photos and videos and label these with the correct local tags and keywords to emphasise your local area.

8. Make sure all the local content you write is not scaped from other sites. Make sure it’s totally unique. You do not want to have any type of duplicate content on your site.

9. Get some of your happy customers to write reviews about your business on Google. This will again, help with the map listing especially if you can get some stars next to your name. This will help you stand out.

10. Start your social media today and make it all about being in the local area. Register your business with Facebook and Instagram and start pushing content and images out there that’s rich with local content.

Related article: How to get your Sydney medical practice or clinic on Google’s front page

What’s the best content to have on a website to attract local customers?

You need high-quality local content especially if you’re going to have individual suburban pages. If you’re a local you will know what to write. For example, if you’re a plumber in Bondi and want to attract local customers in nearby Bronte then you would create a separate page with unique fresh content all about your plumbing services in Bronte with some local facts about the area. Perhaps you know that at the weekend it’s very busy near the beach and parking can be a problem so you may want to tell local customers on your page that you only work from 9 am- 1 pm due to local parking hassles. This is the type of local information that readers want to know about and guess what? So does Google.

In summary, local SEO is not too dissimilar to your main SEO campaign. SEO, as we all know, is not an easy process so if you feel out of your depth with this please get in touch with us here at SEO Sydney Experts. If you want to have a crack at it yourself this checklist is the perfect start.

SEO Sydney Experts Tip: be careful of some SEO agencies that promise they’ll be able to rank you Sydney wide for all suburbs. Trying to rank your business for every suburb with multiple pages is overly spammy and will eventually be detected by Google. Some SEO companies use this as a  marketing and sales tactic to get you to use their services but it’s not going to work. I have heard some agencies tell prospective customers they’ll create 90 or 100 local pages and just replicate the content for each suburban page. While this may seem like a great idea and sound attractive ( I mean who wouldn’t want to rank locally for every suburb ) but in reality, Google will not allow this to happen. For example if your a plumber in Manly with a local Manly address why would Google rank you locally for plumbers in Parramatta? It doesn’t make sense. Be very aware of this scam!