Get ahead In Google Places and Local Listings

If you are a local business you’re looking to stand out amongst the crowd. It might suprise you that the simplest of things can make all the difference even in today’s dynamic industry. This article is not based off of any data but opinion and experience. Throughout my 10 years of SEO experience I have done local SEO for a lot different industries from small businesses to fortune 300 companies including government entities. Optimizing these things will give you a leg up on digital marketing so you won’t have to pay an agency money that you should be saving!

Top 5 Digital Marketing Tactics to Master For A Local Business

1. Optimizing Google My Business – This may seem like a beginner thing to do but some businesses don’t even have this otpimized and/or have the wrong information on there.
   • • Be sure NAP (name,address,phone number) is listed.
     • Be sure you have pictures of your business, your product, location etc for images
     • be sure you have a description of your business and you post your blog articles to your Google my Business and link back to your website
     • Get reviews and respond to them
2. Establishing local pages with proper title tags and heading tags – If your business has multiple locations where a product or service is being sold it is important that there are pages designed for each location.
   • • Each page should have the location in the title of the page, the company name and service or product
     • All pages should be linked to each other and hub pages via internal linking through anchor text and navigational linking.
     • Location pages should address any unique content for the selected area. Location pages should not be identical, they should be somewhat different and specialized for that location.
     • There should be a master page with all locations for the user to choose from.
     • Each location page should have the location and service in the header
     • Each location served should be in the Google My Business.
     • Make sure each location has the location schema in the source code
3. Hub pages link to every other page on your site (blog pages and local pages)
   • • The homepage and hub pages are the most valuable pages on a website according to pagerank algorithm
     • Internal linking is an under-utilized tactic that help users move thought the funnel that is your website, from research to decision making. Your hub pages should connect to your blog pages and decision making pages.
4. Content analysis
   • • Do you know the top 5 pages of your website? Do you know the top content for your competitors website? Review your content and repurpose your top performing content.
     • Try to include location specific blogs/content to tailor to your audience within the location.
     • Try to create comparison content that acts a a Venn diagram for your business and competitors. LLMs and people find this useful when making decisions.
     • Create localized FAQs, while this is a tactic that has been diluted with Google’s latest announcement it is still useful information that can linked to several sources.
5. 3rd party citation creation
   • • One of the biggest factors for local and AI optimization are backlinks/citation.
     • Old tactics like guess blogging can build your backlink profile
     • Use a system like Vendasta for third party directory optimization. This is what West Loop SEO uses for our clients.

In my experience these factors are the most critical elements to beat your competitors and show up in results, jumping from page 3 for your services to page 1. Contact us to receive a free website audit and beat your competitors.