Local SEO Tips For 2017

Get Found Locally

Using White Hat SEO techniques on your website is the best way to weather algorithm changes that inevitably happen. As 2017 unfolds, let’s look at local SEO tips that will set you up for the rest of the year.

Give More Budget to Mobile

As mobile device usage increases year over year, so should the amount of time and money spent on managing your business’ mobile experience. Think about setting up AMP for website pages, test different styles of landing pages for mobile conversions, or shift more of your PPC budget from desktop ads to mobile ones.

Focus Your Link Building Locally

Look for local businesses related to your own, or business communities in your area and reach out to build legitimate links. The benefits will be twofold. Not only will your SEO be boosted, you’ll also foster relationships with businesses that can grow awareness as well as a customer base. Links are votes of confidence, other websites pointing to you as a resource. The goal is to drive qualified traffic; the byproduct is SEO equity.

Update Local Listings

Make sure that all of your local listings are up to date with the right information. Any changes in your phone number or different addresses will frustrate a customer who’s looking to find you and could lose you business. With recent changes and new features to Google My Business, the new year is the perfect time to review this powerful local SEO listing.

Create Ads for Local Searchers

If you’re doing any form of paid advertising, make it local. Create ads for different areas in your city. Making things hyper-local allows you to quickly see where most of your customers are coming from, as well as making it very clear to the customer that you are in the area. By customizing local ads and their corresponding landing pages, you can control ad budgets and drive conversions that best benefit your business.

Share Local Reviews

If you don’t already have some way of sharing customer testimonials with your leads you should. If you do then you should add local touches to them. If you have reviews mentioning your Santa Clara store, make sure they’re on the Santa Clara page. If they mention particular members of staff, do the same. Make it feel that once they’re on the landing page they are part of a local community of customers.

Prepare for Voice Search

Voice search is already being surprisingly (in my mind at least) widely used. Siri and other voice-activated personal assistant bots now make up around 10% of global search traffic. While optimization for voice search, at the moment at least, is not very different to text search you can still get a little more SEO juice from your local listings if you follow these steps from Search Engine Watch on voice search optimization.

Local SEO Tips

If you follow the six steps above you should be able to rule the roost locally for 2017. Do you think that there’s anything we’ve missed that’s going to change local SEO in the coming year?

Photo credit – Top: Mark Jensen
Photo credit – Bottom: Nogran SRO