How do I get more local leads through SEO? As internet marketing is increasingly proving to be essential for effectively advertising businesses to potential clients, obtaining high SEO local rankings is becoming a great concern to many companies. Good rankings in local search engine optimization make it easier for prospective customers to find information about your business, whenever they are searching for similar products or services to the ones you are providing online. In fact local SEO is an under-utilised opportunity for most small businesses.
This is why it pays to know how you can boost your local rankings in Search Engine Results Papers (SERPs). To achieve this, here are the top 7 tested and proven techniques we use that any business can use with guaranteed success.
1. Quality/Authority of Structured Citations
Well, the first thing you may want to work on as a company is to obtain as many quality citations as possible. When many other webpages mention your business name, even without living links to your website, your local SEO rankings will automatically increase.
Search engines use citations as one of the mechanisms to determine how relevant a website’s content is on a given niche or keyword. The credibility of the content on your website is often considered as good as the number of quality citations of your website. Keep in mind your rankings will shoot even higher if the citations come from well revered and established websites. Therefore, it’s not all about the quantity of citations, but more of the authority or quality of the citations that matter.
2. Quality/Authority of Inbound Links to Domain
Inbound links, links from other sites to your site, are normally a measure of the popularity of the website of a business. Similar to citations, when a website has many backlinks from established businesses, its local search engine optimization rankings, are more likely to increase. Approach back links with caution though.
3. Quantity of Reviews by Authority Reviewers
Customer reviews play a big role when it comes to local SEO rankings. However if you really want to get to the top SERPs, make a point of encouraging your customers to review your site on authority third party reviewers such as Yelp or Tripadvisor, among others.
Since these are renowned review sites, receiving many positive reviews on these sites is likely to give a positive influence your local SEO rankings. Nevertheless make sure you encourage your customers to review your company on authority reviewers that do not necessarily require them to register; as that may discourage most of them.
4. Consistency of Structured Citations
While receiving many quality citations can incredibly boost your rankings on search engines, most search engines have a keen eye on the consistency of the citations. So even though you may have received fairly sizeable citations, your local rankings won’t increase overnight. But if you continue receiving citations over a considerable period, then you will stand better chances of ranking highly on local SEO.
5. Quantity of Citations from Industry-Relevant Domains
Depending on the industry you are in, citations from certain webpages will be considered more essential than others during SEO local rankings. Usually, the citations that are more integral are ones that come from industry relevant domains.
6. Quantity of Native Google Places Reviews
The number of reviews you have on Google Places is also extremely indispensable in obtaining higher local SEO rankings. You may, therefore, want to give this equal importance in your efforts to attract better local rankings from search engines.
7. Domain Authority of Website
Your choice of domain name is last but not least, a consequential part of boosting your local rankings. The bottom-line here is you must choose a suitable domain name so as to give your website more authority in your respective niche or industry. Particularly if your website domain shows relevance to some of the top keywords in your industry, it will have good domain authority. For example if you offer window cleaning services in Melbourne a great domain name would be windowcleanersmelbourne.com.au