If you want to optimize your website, reach more customers, and make your business effectively through the amazing local SEO checklist helps your local SEO strategy for your marketing success. Taking advantage of mobile and more closely targeting your consumers based on their behaviors are critical elements of your local SEO strategy.
Customers everywhere are using the internet to search for nearly all the products and services they buy today. This goes beyond basic retail and even eCommerce. In a highly digital world, customers want local answers, products, and services at their fingertips.
One of the most significant differences between local SEO and general SEO is how you target your customers. But some differences go beyond this as well. Local consumers are constantly looking for better, more relevant experiences with “near me” searches. Around 46% of Google searches have local intent.
The advance of GPS-based apps on today’s average smartphone makes finding a local business fast and easy. Your business needs to enhance your local search campaign with hyper-local strategies that make you visible on geolocation and mapping-based tools like Google My Business listings and Google Maps. Failing to show up on these searches is a huge missed opportunity for business owners.
If you want to remain one step ahead of your competitors, here’s the complete local SEO checklist to help you.
Local SEO Checklist: Optimizing Your Website
Follow these steps to optimize your website for better local SEO checklist results:
- Define your location strategy. If you have multiple locations for your business, you’ll need to follow a more complicated process than if you have a single location. Brick-and-mortar businesses, online businesses, and home-based businesses all have different strategies for their marketing success. Keep the details of your business in mind while creating your local SEO strategy.
- Create the website pages essential to SEO results. This includes contact, about, and homepage on your website.
- Make sure you include your NAP for each location on your website. NAP refers to the complete name, address, and phone number of your business.
- For businesses with less than 10 locations, list all addresses in your website’s footer.
- If you don’t include your business address for privacy reasons, be sure to include all the phone numbers you use for business purposes. Make them easily visible on your website.
- Make all phone numbers clickable via mobile.
- Ensure all NAP entries are consistent throughout your website.
- Add a Google Map to your contact page so customers can easily find you. This will also improve your local SEO.
- Help Google quickly identify your local business by using Schema structured data markups.
- Create and complete your Google My Business listings page and verify your website through your GMB listing.
Before we jump into the next section of the checklist, let’s go over some of the terms and references we covered above.
What Is Local Schema Markup?
Google, Bing, and Yahoo created schema markup to provide support for a common group of tags used by search engines to understand better and display data. Brick-and-mortar shops commonly use local schema markup to help their business appear in the SERPs for answer boxes, carousels, and other rich snippets.
Why Does Schema Markup Matter for Local SEO?
Schema has grown as an effective optimization strategy for local SEO because it places businesses in the essential answer boxes and rich snippets at the top of search engine results. Therefore, using schema markups is a great way to increase exposure to your target audience with your local SEO checklist strategy.
What Are the Different Formats of Schema Markup Data?
There are three forms of schema available. These include:
- Standard schema microdata– This is the most common schema markup data. It is marked up via HTML and is the easiest to learn how to implement.
- JSON-LD– This is the most highly recommended format. It is marked up via JavaScript.
- RDFa– RDFa works well in a variety of different document types. This includes XML, HTML 4, SVG, and others.
What Markups Should I Use for My Local Business?
Using the following markup values can help you achieve the best results:
- Organization schema markup
Organization schema markup is a powerful tool that allows you to produce brand signals that can help improve your website snippet presence and Knowledge Graph entry in the search engine results pages. Make sure to include your corporate contact details, social links, and logo.
- Website schema markup
Website schema markup will help your website name get featured in the search results. While you need to have an existing site search, enabling the Sitelinks Search Box element of this schema is extremely beneficial to your brand.
- Breadcrumbs markup
Using Breadcrumb schema with Breadcrumb rich snippets is an extremely powerful tool for local SEO.
- Site navigation schema markup
Using SiteNavigationElement markup helps improve the way search engines understand the structure of your website. This boosts navigation and influences organic sitelinks.
- Video schema markup
In a highly technology-driven world, videos are vital to a successful SEO strategy today. For certain search queries, video content actually outranks sites. Hosted or embedded video content can be leveraged through VideoObject schema. Just like you see video-rich snippets from credible websites like YouTube show up in the search engine results, video schema can help rich snippets from your website show up in the Google Video Search.
How Do I Implement Schema Markup On My Site?
Before you try to implement schema markups on your website, read through Google’s guidelines. This will give you a better idea of what to do and how to do it. You’ll need to learn as much coding as possible. Since some coding languages tend to be problematic, the best approach is to hire an SEO professional with experience in schema markups. Simple options like JSON-LD are available and easier to understand than more complicated code.
Follow all instructions carefully. Choose the correct template and adhere to that specific template while creating code. Be descriptive and add value where possible. Adding elements like Google Maps location, your website URL, and social profiles can help you achieve optimal results.
What Are Google’s Guidelines on Schema Structured Data?
Google offers a wealth of guidelines to restrict spammy schema markup and make sure spam doesn’t appear in the SERPs. Businesses using schema should make sure it is never spammy. Schema data should always accurately reflect what your page is about. If you use a spammy schema, you can expect to be penalized by Google at some point. To avoid this, Google recommends that your data meet structured guidelines.
It’s essential to meet these guidelines. The best way to ensure your markups align meet Google standards is to ensure that they always align with the page’s user intent. All schema markups should march user intent as closely as possible to get your business the best results. For example, don’t mark up a page intended for a restaurant with a markup that is designed for a hair salon.
Schema markups should never be irrelevant or misleading. Your markup should also be complete to meet Google’s parameters for inclusion. For example, if the markup calls for an image or a specific piece of information, don’t neglect to include it.
Check Your Markups
Once you’re done, take your time to check and perfect the code. If you are ready to deploy the schema, run it through the Google Structured Data Tool first. This tool is incredibly helpful in validating your code before uploading it to your site. Developing reliable code and verifying its effectiveness before uploading to our website is the best way to achieve optimal SEO results with schema markups.
Local SEO: Content
High-quality content attracts viewers and encourages other websites to link to your content. Links and content are two of the most vital ranking factors for Google, so having a local content strategy is essential.
Studies show that having quality review and link profiles, ranking high in organic results, and incorporating category and geographic keywords into your content continue to be critical considerations for ranking in the local pack results. Additionally, relevant and high-authority backlinks are still the top ranking factors for local SEO Services.
Optimize your local SEO checklist content with these steps:
- Create a website content strategy that keeps accessibility in mind.
- Use localized keywords to optimize title tags and meta descriptions.
- Optimize static text content and blog content with local keyword variations to target more viewers.
- Include local photos and videos to improve the quality of your content and complement your local message.
- Publish original content. Google will quickly flag your website if they notice repeat content.
- Clean up duplicate listings. Check out free tools like Moz Local or talk to your local SEO professional for help.
- Analyze your content for duplicate content, as well. Clean up any duplicate content since it can negatively impact your SEO efforts.
Content for Multiple Businesses
If you have multiple business locations, it’s essential to consider how this will affect your local SEO checklist and strategy. Think hard about whether you need to create numerous websites and consult an SEO professional before you waste your time and efforts.
Local SEO Houston experts suggest that it’s better to have one healthy website to house all of your brands. Follow this content checklist if you have multiple businesses:
- Offer location-specific promotions to help differentiate locations.
- Host or sponsor events in different cities that give you something to write about on your website.
- Use specific demographics and locations in your blog posts.
- Create a content calendar. This will help you stay organized and allow you to plan your content. It also comes in handy with seasonal content ranking opportunities, such as holidays.
- Use Google Trends to identify seasonal trends and edit your products, menus, or services.
- Ask users to submit user-generated content. This includes testimonials and reviews.
Local SEO Citations:
Citations are references that provide viewers with your name, address, phone number, and website information. Also referred to as NAP+W, citations can be complete or partial. Offering full and accurate citations is essential for your online success. Here’s what you should do with citations:
- Add manual or automatic citations.
- Use third-party for local citations and listings. Provides like BrightLocal, MozLocal, Whitespark, Advice Local, and Yext are great examples of third-party sources.
- Analyze any citations that already exist online and be sure they are complete and accurate.
Local SEO Social Media & Customer Reviews:
Social media and customer reviews are also critical components of your local SEO strategy. Follow these steps to take advantage of social media and customer reviews in your “local SEO checklist“.
- Take advantage of customer testimonials and reviews by posting them to your website.
- List your business on Yelp, Foursquare, and Bing Places.
- List your business on Zagat, if applicable.
- If you haven’t already creating your Google My Business listing, do that ASAP. This can significantly impact your local SEO because Google reviews are the first that people see when they search for your business online.
- Find a business listing management tool to help you optimize your local business information online.
- Invest in a customer review management tool like OnDemandReviews or ReviewTrackers. These will immediately notify you about customer reviews and alert you when further action is required.
- Create your social media strategy.
- Identify the social media platforms that are most popular with your target audience.
- Analyze your competition to see where they interact most with customers and clients on social media.
- Claim or create your business profile on all major social media platforms. This includes Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and more.
- Localize your social networks by linking them back to your website.
- Add complete and accurate NAP+W to your social media profiles.
- Get verified on as many social media platforms as possible.
- Designate or hire someone to handle your social media accounts, interact with customers, post content, and maintain a consistent content strategy.
- Share any high-quality user-generated content across all social media platforms.
- Get your Google My Business profile verified and optimize your GMB listing.
- Encourage customers to add reviews to your Google My Business listing. Don’t try to force reviews because Google will flag your account as suspicious if you receive too many reviews at once.
- NEVER pay for fake reviews. Only encourage reviews from real customers who have their own opinion on your products and services.
- Check customer review rules and trends periodically throughout the year to ensure best practices.
- Respond respectfully to negative reviews. Do your best to resolve any customer issues.
- Track and analyze your rankings. This includes organic keyword rankings.
- Do a site audit every so often to monitor any red flags.
Now you are ready to get started on your path to the best “local SEO checklist” results for your business. Talk to an SEO professional to create an effective strategy for your business. Have you optimized your Google My Business listing? This is a vital step in your marketing success. To learn more about how you can create and optimize your GMB for free, check out this article.