Local SEO Tips to Grow Your Business

The data is irrefutable — local SEO is essential for any business serving its community.

Four out of five people use search engines for local queries
18% of local searches result in a purchase within 24 hours
Half of smartphone users visit a store within one day following a local search

But as the potential of local SEO grows, so does the competition for local search traffic and visibility.

That's why we've created this comprehensive local SEO guide – to help you identify the key local ranking factors and position your business effectively across all its locations.

Here's what you'll learn:

Let’s start with some basics about how local SEO works.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO encompasses various practices designed to attract more customers by improving a business's visibility in local search results (including Maps, local packs, and localized search listings).

It's important to remember that local SEO goes beyond just Google. Customers search for local businesses from a range of search engines and platforms – Google Maps, Google Search, Bing Local, Bing Maps, Apple Maps, and more.

Notably, Apple launched Business Connect allowing local businesses to claim and optimize their Apple Maps locations. This directory gives businesses the opportunity to build their local presence with an estimated 75-100 million Apple Maps users in the U.S.

Having said that, Google continues to dominate the market. For that reason, we'll primarily focus on attracting local traffic through the search engine in this guide.

Who Needs Local SEO?

Anyone who operates a brick-and-mortar store can benefit from local SEO and earning more visibility through search.

Whether you're a small business owner or an SEO at a large enterprise company with hundreds of store locations, local SEO is a great way to generate more foot traffic to your business.

How Local Search Works: Local Pack vs. Organic Search Results

The easiest way to explain how local search works vs. organic results is with an example. Imagine you need to find a place to take a client for a lunch meeting.

The simplest option is to fire up a search engine and ask for recommendations. Here, we’ve searched for the query, “places for business lunch near me.”

LocalTips

Notice the two distinct sections in the search engine results page (SERP) above? One is a local pack, the other includes organic results.

The local pack shows the top businesses that rank in Google Maps for the target phrase. It also includes additional information about each company to help me decide which option best suits my needs.

The other section contains the regular content you’d see in any SERP. However, in this case, it's targeting local information as well.

Here’s an incredibly vital thing you must remember about local SEO:

Appearing in the local pack or in Google Maps (where pack results come from) *has nothing to do with your website, its content, or domain authority.***

Local SEO Ranking Factors

Since local rankings are unrelated to your website, what affects where your business shows up?

Google lists three key attributes that help determine the local ranking:

Relevance, which defines how well a local listing matches what a user is looking for.
Distance, which refers to how far each result is from the location term used in a query (e.g. the search engine will prioritize businesses near Chicago’s Millennium Park for queries relating to the location).
Prominence. This factor is all about how well-known a business is. Think of it as a business’s authority (similar to the domain authority that affects regular organic rankings).

Here’s how they work in practice.

The Two Aspects of Succeeding in Local SEO

There are two separate aspects of succeeding in local SEO:

Being found, which is all about working with the local algorithm to improve how well you rank in Google Maps, the local pack, and other platforms such as Apple Maps.
Being selected, which focuses on convincing users to choose your listing over the others.

Here are the factors that determine your success in each.

#1. Being Found

Being found focuses on ensuring that your business shows up prominently in Google Maps, the local results, and other prominent platforms like Apple Maps.

Whether you do is primarily influenced by two factors: Local Attributes and reviews.

Local Attributes

Local Attributes within the Google Business Profile define almost every aspect of service delivery or business operations. They help distinguish a business so that Google can understand it better and display it for relevant local searches.

For example, this restaurant decided to list the following attributes:

image-Jul-16-2020-05-49-48-83-PM

Here's another example:

As previously stated, Apple's launch of Business Connect also provides an opportunity for local businesses to customize their information on Apple Maps.

Setting up and claiming locations only takes a few minutes and allows businesses to view and edit location details, add photos, and review the engagement and performance of their Apple Maps locations.

Reviews

Reviews are the other major factor contributing to your local rankings. Overall, three specific review-related factors affect your local search positions:

The Number of Reviews
The number of reviews your business or location has will affect its Prominence (one of the three main local ranking factors) as businesses with more reviews in their respective categories tend to be more popular.

Review Score
Overall review score also impacts Prominence as Google is less likely to rank businesses with low scores than businesses whose customers openly admit to being satisfied with their service or products.

Responsiveness to Reviews
Businesses that quickly respond to reviews come across as more customer-oriented and caring. Naturally, the search engine will want to promote them over companies that do not make such an impression.

#2. Being Selected

The factors above help you work with the local algorithm to ensure rankings and local visibility.

Unfortunately, in local SEO, that’s only half of the battle. The other part is being selected from all the options a user has in Google Maps.

Here’s a quick maps search result for the phrase “coffee shops near me.” Mind you; it represents only above-the-fold results.

In a crowded market or area, it can be difficult to pick out your business's name from the group, which means it's even harder for users.

(Local search results for "coffee shops near me".)

So, what factor affects whether your business is being selected?

Quality of Reviews

The number of reviews, your overall score, and your responsiveness all help your business rank higher in local search results.

But what customers say in those reviews is what makes them pick you … or skip you.

This also means that any negative reviews might not influence the ranking algorithm that much. However, they will be damaging to a person’s selection process.

Best Practices for Improving Local Search Visibility

A few simple tweaks can go a long way in earning more search visibility. Here's a list of 12 local SEO tips and strategies to implement:

#1. Optimize your Google Business and Apple Business Connect Profile Listings

Optimizing your Google Business and Apple Business Connect Profiles is a must for local SEO as it opens the door to additional discovery.

Example of Google My Business Listing

(An example of a Google Business listing.)

You can enhance your listing by responding to reviews, keeping store hours updated, providing correct contact information, adding direct links (menus, appointments, services), and more.

As local search becomes more visual, businesses can also optimize their listings by using unique, high-quality images and videos for each category or product on their profiles.

#2. Act on Local SEO Buying Intent

Your customers won't always have the same intent. So how do you uncover and capitalize on the specific local intent across multiple locations?

One of the most powerful ways is to analyze what actions your customers take when they view a particular location in Google. Then, improve any areas of your local visibility that correspond with those actions.

For example, some may be looking to find directions or contact information. In that case, you'd want to have easily findable contact information like a phone number.

Again, this is a great time to optimize your Google Business Profile with that information!

Other customers may be interested in looking up product availability. With such insight, you’ll quickly know that you need to improve product information and schema markup for products to ensure they find this information faster (and discover you as the provider, not the competition).

Platforms like LocalClarity allow you to analyze and correlate results from multiple locations on the fly, providing insights on an aggregate level.

#3. Monitor Online Reviews

Online reviews can be great resources for understanding customer feedback. You'll be able to see what's going right, and perhaps more importantly, if your customers have feedback that can be addressed.

When you analyze and correlate reviews from multiple areas, you may also discover issues customers face in select locations, but not nationally.

For example, here is a review for a hotel chain:

4-5

However, customers in their other locations praise the cleanliness and the room interior.

So, what should you look at when assessing reviews?

The frequency of negative vs. positive reviews by location.
Most common problems customers mention in reviews by location or area.
The severity of those problems to pinpoint locations that require immediate attention.

LocalClarity helps national brands access reviews and other customer data across multiple locations from one dashboard, making it easy to quickly spot urgent issues. You can also sort by negative reviews to ensure they get addressed quickly.

#4. Set Up Local Rank Tracking for All Your Locations

You can't know what's going right if you can't measure progress. Proper tracking and attribution are key to evaluating the success of your work and proving the value of your actions.

Recommended Reading: A Strategic Approach to Geo Reporting in SEO

Naturally, local rank tracking is far easier if your company operates in a single location.

But an enterprise company with multiple locations scattered around the country or even the globe must rely on far more powerful data. And to fully evaluate the impact of various campaigns, it must have all this data in one place.

To succeed, set up local rank tracking for every location you operate in, ideally down to the ZIP code.

seoClarity offers the most accurate local rank tracking designed for enterprise companies operating in multiple locations. It uses geo-located IPs to collect local ranking data from local data centers.

#5. Create Localized Content

Each business location has unique attributes. For example, maybe a coffee shop has an outside patio or offers free Wi-Fi.

You can promote these attributes on location-specific landing pages.

Doing so helps the pages become more relevant to local searches that relate directly to the audience's needs.

#6. Make Pages Easy to Crawl

A common digital marketing mistake with local SEO is to hide local landing pages deep into the site's architecture without any internal links pointing to them.

Some are buried so deep that it's nearly impossible for Googlebot to find them with the available crawl budget (Google won't explore your site forever.)

Naturally, you don’t have to link to local landing pages everywhere. But even a dedicated page listing those assets will help crawlers easily access and index that content.

Hilton Hotels’ website, for example, features a locations page, listing and linking to all the company’s location pages – both the region and individual properties in that location.

google-1594924403388

google-1594924451174

#7. Ensure NAP Consistency

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number and relates to the business and contact data published about its specific locations across the web (some SEOs include the page's URL here, too). These are also referred to as local citations.

Google previously used this data to confirm that whatever information it had on the business or location was accurate (and thus, the listing was worth pushing higher in rankings).

Today, NAP consistency does not hold the same strength as a factor in local search or map rankings.

But given how many customers search for local information outside of the Google eco-system, it’s still worth updating the local citation data to ensure it's consistent and up-to-date.

#8. Mention the Location in the Meta Tags

Including location names and specific identifying features within landing pages’ meta titles will increase their chances of appearing higher in local searches.

Plus, searchers may be enticed to click if they can see from the SERP that your listing is the location they're looking for.

#9. Optimize the Site for Voice Search

According to the data from KPCB, 22% of voice queries focus on finding local information.

What does that mean for your strategy? For one, your website should be optimized to deliver answers to the most common questions people ask about your product or service (i.e. store hours, directions, etc.)

Ensuring all this information is readily available on each location’s landing page is a great start.

#10. Optimize for Mobile

The importance of mobile, especially for local SEO, can't be overstated.

Just look at these statistics (compiled by HubSpot):

88% of searches for local businesses on a mobile device either call or visit the business within 24 hours
78% of location-based mobile searches result in an offline purchase.
18% of local smartphone searches led to a purchase within a day, whereas only 7% of non-local searches led to a sale.
61% of mobile searchers are more likely to contact a local business if they have a mobile-friendly site.

To ensure your site is optimized for mobile, check that pages display well on small smartphone screens, the content is easy to read, and pictures are clear and can be scaled up if needed.

Your pages must also open fast on mobile devices, even if a person is on a slower network.

#11. Improve Local Keyword Targeting

When optimizing local landing pages, many companies often either focus on general keywords or specify the location in general terms (like city or state).

However, there’s far more you can target in local search.

Don't be afraid to get specific with your keyword targeting. You can even go as granular as the zip code level.

Car rentals by Zip Code, Topic Explorer
(Topic Explorer in the seoClarity platform.)

Or a specific location or a landmark.

Car rentals near airport, Topic Explorer
(Topic Explorer in the seoClarity platform.)

Long-tail keywords like these often have less competition and higher conversion rates.

After researching your local keywords thoroughly, include them in all the page elements that affect on-page SEO: meta tags, headings, within the body copy, image alt tags, and more.

#12. Add Relevant Schema to the Site

Schema provides Google with more information about your site — opening hours, star ratings, reviews, a business address or phone number, etc. Google may display some of that information on the SERP, enhancing your local search listings.

Some of the most common types of schema to include on local listings are local business schema, ratings, and reviews.

Key Takeaways

Local SEO is critical for any business operating in a specific location
Ranking in Google Maps, Local results, and Apple Maps has nothing to do with the company’s website
Factors that affect being found in local search include the information in the company’s Google Business Profile, local attributes it specified, the number of reviews, review score, and the business’ responsiveness to reviews. Keep in mind those external directories like Yelp!
The content of reviews influences whether customers select your listing from the SERPs over the others.

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