7 Most Common Local SEO Mistakes to Avoid

SEO Chalkboard

Shockingly, businesses are missing out on multiple hot leads because they haven’t optimized their websites for local customers. They’ve made the effort to rank their website well on Google and have potentially paid a substantial amount of money to do so. Now all they need is for someone to search for a product or service they offer and with a bit of luck, their website will be found and the company will make the sale, right?

Wrong. What happens when the business caters to the local population and the website visitor is on the other side of the world? That’s right, no sale. To avoid this embarrassment and to ensure your potential local customers know all about you, use these 7 key local SEO steps to optimize your website, so customers in your area turn into leads.

Create a My Google Business Profile

A study by American Expressed revealed that 73% of Americans prefer to shop with local businesses, and 9 out of 10 participants said they always try to deal with a local business. Given that 65% of the global population uses Google as their main search engine, it’s likely approximately 65% of your local population do also. It’s obvious your business is missing out if you don’t have a My Google Business profile.

Optimize Key Words For Local Searches

If a potential customer is searching for a product or service within their local area and type in the name of the city or town, in which they live, all the businesses that have optimized their keywords to include that location are going to appear in the search. If your business has not optimized the keywords to rank in local searches, then do so. If you don’t, you risk losing business to competitors. Be wary of keyword including too many keywords as this can have a negative impact on your rankings. SmallSEOtools can help you avoid this.

Make Sure Your Contact Information Is Up To Date

You’ve optimized your SEO to rank well within local searches and your customers are now to finding you. What happens if your contact information is missing or outdated? Customers won’t be able to contact you. Surprisingly this is a common mistake that is easily avoided by using services such as Yoast who can provide SEO optimization for your complete site.

Create High-Quality Engaging Content

Once your local customers have found you, they want to know what solutions you provide and how it benefits them. An effortless way to achieve this to create high quality, informative content. You’ll need to make sure that the content is SEO optimized and sites like Paperfellows and Custom essay provide easy to use services.

Blogs and articles of 2500 words tend to rank on page 1 of Google. Use Easywordcount to keep track of the length of your content.

Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile Friendly

Over 51% of websites are now accessed via mobile devices. Therefore, you can’t risk having a website that is not optimized for mobile devices. Studies have shown that 60 to 90% of small businesses don’t have their websites optimized.

An outdated website doesn’t reflect well on your business. Remember when you update your website, SEO optimization is still relevant and if you want to be sure that the written content throughout is up-to-date, try SEO copywriting services such as Essay writing service and Write my essay.

Include Customer Reviews

Having customer reviews present on your local listing profiles such as My Google Business Profile, Google Plus, and Yelp, helps to significantly boost your local rankings. When Google observes that people are interacting with your profile and leaving good reviews, you’ll start to climb the rankings. Ask your customers to leave positive reviews and you’ll build a quality profile in no time.

Google rewards quality backlinks. When Google sees that you are being talked about by authoritative sites, your website will sky-rocket up the ranking system. There are two ways that you’ll receive quality backlinks. The first is by providing an exceptional service that will build your reputation and people will express an interest in your business and will start linking back to your site or content.

An alternative is to collaborate with authoritative sites and ask if they are willing to work with you and point back to your website.† Of course, this isn’t always a possibility and if you want to start getting rankings before you receive backlinks, then consider using a ranking analysis tool like Ahrefs which will help you discover optimizations that will help your website rank.

If you don’t optimize your website for SEO and specifically for local SEO, your business is missing out on a potentially huge customer base. You can guarantee if you’re not attracting those customers, your competitors are.

This is a guest contribution by Gloria Kopp, a digital marketer and an elearning consultant from Manville city. Now she works as a content manager at Academized writing service. Besides, she is a regular contributor to such websites as Engadget, Assignment Writing Service, Huffingtonpost etc. Read her Studydemic blog

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