5 local search tips that will help you supercharge your rankings and capture untapped revenue potential.
Discover 5 local search tips that will help you supercharge your rankings and capture untapped revenue potential.
1. optimize your Google My Business listings
When you do a local search, Google My Business listings are often among the first results. These listings provide a quick overview of your business on the SERP, including address, hours, Google rating, and a call button. Clicking on each listing will provide additional information such as reviews, photos, directions, and a link to your business website.
To ensure that your Google My Business listing ranks well for local searches, you need to provide information that is accurate, complete and helpful. First, make sure your addresses, hours of operation and phone numbers are up-to-date. In addition, using appealing photos in your profile can help tell your business's story and increase engagement. Finally, you need a good review management strategy (more on that below) - your star rating and number of reviews are important ranking factors for your Google My Business page. Learn more about how to improve your Google My Business ranking on this Google FAQs page.
One of the most common actions after accessing a Google My Business listing is to make a phone call. 24% of people who click on a Google My Business listing call directly from that listing. And during the COVID -19 outbreak, Google My Business calls doubled.
To capitalize on this trend, marketers are placing call tracking numbers on their Google My Business listings. With a call tracking solution, you can see the quantity and quality of calls originating from your GMB listings. With these insights, you can evaluate your overall SEO performance and optimize your GMB pages to improve call quality.
Do not worry: adding trackable DNI (Dynamic Number Insertion) phone numbers to your website and listings will not affect Google's NAP.
2. Put a strong review management strategy in place.
As mentioned earlier, reviews are one of the most important ranking factors for Google My Business. They are also an important ranking factor for other local sites where your business may appear, such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, Angie's List, Zocdoc and others. Aside from rankings, they also have a big impact on whether searchers engage with your listing and eventually become customers.
Below are some quick tips on how to manage your reviews:
Educate your customers on how they can submit a review.
Offer your customers incentives for submitting reviews.
Showcase good reviews on your website (with the reviewer's permission)
Continuously monitor your reviews
Respond to each review promptly and honestly
Provide excellent service that gives your customers a reason to rate you
3. Make sure your NAP is consistent on your website and web properties
The NAP (name, address and phone number) is a critical ranking factor for local search results. To ensure that you are a reputable business, Google compares your business name, the addresses of your various locations, and the phone numbers of those locations on your website and in other web listings.
To ensure consistency from NAP on your website, you should add your company name, branch addresses, and branch phone numbers to your pages in the form of schema markup. Schema, also known as structured data, is the language of search engines - it is easier for crawlers to identify data in this format. You can add Schema markups to your website as HTML code or plugins.
To ensure consistency of NAP across the web, some marketers use listing management tools like Yext. After you enter your site information into a central interface, the listing management tools automatically update the information in hundreds of web listings.
If you use DNI (Dynamic Number Insertion) phone numbers for call tracking on your website or in your listings, they will not negatively impact your NAP score. DNI displays a unique phone number to each visitor based on the marketing source the visitor came through. This unique phone number is inserted via dynamic javascript code that is not crawled by search engines - therefore it has no impact on NAP. The default phone number of the site remains hardcoded on the website to be crawled by search engines.
4. add schema markers to your website
As mentioned earlier, adding Schema, the language of search engines, to your website code can help crawlers more easily identify important information such as your company's name, address, and locations. However, you can also use Schema to add more information about your business to the SERP.
5. Create location-specific pages
As mentioned earlier, 46% of all Google searches are for local information. If you are not creating local content on your website, you are missing out on a great opportunity to appear in these search results.
It's best to create a location page for each city, state, and region you serve. When someone searches for "Renters Insurance Chicago", you'll have a much easier time showing up in search results if you have a page for that location that mentions Chicago in key areas like the title tags, meta description, H1s, text, URLs, and image alt tags.
Of course, you should not create identical location pages where the location name has been swapped out - Google recognizes this as duplicate content and it hurts your rankings. Instead, take the time to provide real, valuable information about each location. This includes site-specific testimonials, case studies, and FAQs. For example, if you sell renters insurance, you could add content on tenant laws specific to Chicago.
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