Is your brand visible to potential customers? If you're a local business and you haven't nailed down your local SEO, you're missing the opportunity to be seen when that customer searches on desktop or on mobile.
But local SEO isn't some mysterious entity. It's a series of concerted steps. And we can help you tailor those local SEO efforts to your business model. Simply find your business type on the following illustration and follow the steps that are specific to your needs.
Local SEO for all business types
But wait! You aren't done yet. There are some local SEO steps that work for businesses of all kinds. Use the checklist below to make sure you're ticking all the boxes to get seen in the SERPs. To jump ahead to a section, use these links:
- Technical website criteria
- Getting local content right
- Citations
- Duplicate listing cleanup
- Earning reviews
- Social media for local business
- Out there in the real world
If you're a paper and pen type (or just want to save your checklist for later), download your very own copy of the Local SEO Checklist here:
Technical website criteria
Everything that applies to traditional SEO also applies to local SEO.
Regardless of business model, every local business website needs to be indexable, error-free, multi-device-compliant, well-structured, and properly optimized. See the complete technical checklist.
In addition to the above, local website optimization requires that you:
If you have 10 or less locations, the complete name, address, and phone number of each should be in the sitewide footer element.
Use Schema markup of your location data. See Adding Schema Location Markup to Your Website and Local Business Schema Q&A with David Deering for basic and advanced knowledge.
Your phone number is highly visible on your website and clickable on mobile devices.
Your name, address, and phone number (NAP) is consistent everywhere it is mentioned on your website. Beware of naming discrepancies for any business or mixing up NAP elements between multi-location companies or multi-practitioner businesses.
All location pages are linked to from a high-level navigation menu.
If you want to keep your street address private, don't publish it on your website, but do be sure you're providing a phone number that is staffed during stated business hours.
Getting local content right
Content is an important part of any SEO effort, so make sure you're not tripping yourself up with thin or duplicate content. Here's a list of common content mistakes followed by a checklist of ways to increase the local SEO impact of your content.
Content mistakes to avoid
- Don't scrape content from other websites, even from the websites of manufacturers or authorities, unless you are publishing an attributed quote within your own, unique content.
- If you offer the same services or products in multiple cities, think carefully about attempting to create a unique page for every possible city/keyword combination. Only embark on this plan if you know you have sufficient resources of time, money, and talent to create truly high-quality pages for each combination. Avoid publishing thin or useless pages. If you know you don't have the resources, it's better to go with just a strong page for each city and a strong page for each service, rather than creating lots of thin or duplicate city/keyword combo pages. See this complete resource on developing city landing pages.
- Think long and hard before deciding to take a multi-website approach, even if your company offers multiple services or has multiple offices. Numerous experts agree that it is almost always better to build a single, powerhouse website that promotes your brand and all of its services and branches rather than dividing up time, funding and talent between multiple websites. For more on this, see this community discussion.
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