How To Do Local Search, SEO & Dominate In 2024 And Beyond
Local SEO is the most economical approach and productive way of web-marketing. This investment is excellent since it helps you gain visitors to your site, leading to increased sales for your company. Local SEO also assists with a better user experience of search engines such as Google or Bing to ensure client loyalty.
Local search engine optimisation (SEO) is essential and vital to remain competitive in the market nowadays. Google Maps Ranking guarantees that potential consumers will notice you, no matter where or what device they look for while visiting your website to achieve optimum exposure!
How can you rank your business?
Local SEO is completely different than traditional SEO that most agencies and businesses are doing. Google Maps may have a good ranking for local companies.
Local SEO is the biggest thing that happened to small businesses over the past few years, and it’s driving so much more traffic than google ads or traditional SEO. More individuals are searching for local information through search engines. 97% of individuals learn more about a business online than they do anywhere else. The majority learn about local companies not just online, but 84% of Google users regularly perform local searches. Consumers are regularly looking for local information.
In this guide, these strategies will help you rank any business at the top of Google search results.
1) Hire a verified Google photographer
Hire a Google verified photographer to boost your visibility—the cost between 400 to 1000 dollars to get done. Do a 360 photo of the interior and exterior of your business and upload it to Google search results into the map listings.
You can also hire a Google-verified photographer even from home to come and take a quick 360 photo of your little office.
Why do you do this?
When you do a Google verified photograph, it shows the location where that photo was taken. A trusted photographer uploads it to your Google business, my business; that’s a trust and ranking factor.
2) Add Photos Using GMB
Login into GMB on your phone. Log in and take photos of your office using the website function. https://www.google.com/intl/en_au/business/
How does it help?
The app has the coordinates connected to the photo. When you take the photo, google knows the person taking the photo was in that area. So you are in that location taking pictures of your staff, exterior, and interior. It fills out the profile with those longitude and latitude photos within the app. That’s a compelling way to signal to Google that this is a verified listing because you have to be there to take the picture.
3) Review Locations
If you need maximum reviews from different locations around the region to rank your business, send customers an email/SMS and ask them for a review.
Why do you do this?
It tells Google that you are not just relevant in a specific map region. You want all people over the region to leave you reviews, and you want to rank everywhere. You are not one little seller; you’re going to generate a massive amount of customers.
Now, of course, you have to service that area, but most businesses service the whole city. So you get fewer reviews, but they are more valuable to your business.
4) Get Reviews Weekly
To get your business rank, you need as many reviews as possible. Some businesses do not ask customers for reviews by sending them an email link. They are worried that customers are going to generate some negative reviews.
What do you need to do?
You need to create a conditional logic form that pre-filters all of your customers. Send out a mass email with a conditional logic form that rates your service on a scale from 0 to 10.
If your customer answers positively to all of those points on a conditional logic form and you submit it and redirect it to Google My Business, you get a 5-star review. If a customer answers negatively to those points, the form is sent to a place where customers can leave their feedback, and the form gets submitted to you to handle the query. It doesn’t air your dirty laundry to everybody. You deal with it internally, and then you can freely put it on your email signatures. You can send it out automatically to all your clients once you finish offering your product or service. Now you will be able to get those massive amounts of reviews.
We have had a lot of success with texting a client a link a few hours after their appointment and emailing a link with the invoice.
5) Reply to Reviews
You need to reply to all of your reviews. If you do not respond to your review, it is not a plus on your profile. So every time someone leaves a review, hop in there and thank them for using your product or service. You can use some keywords but do not overdo it. Just make sure every single reply to a review is super simple.
How does it help?
It shows Google that you are engaging with your customers regularly.
6) Deal with Cheaters
A lot of people are cheating on the google local listings. If you put your business name as the service you are offering, you are in trouble. The problem with that is that Google has a biased view of the business’s name because you have to put one name. When Google searches, there is a kind of glitch in their system, you will be banned from Google, and that’s the worst thing that could ever happen to your business.
How to deal with the problem?
You can edit it back by going through the service that you offer. You’ll see that other people have not put their business name as their actual listing title. So you can suggest and edit the exact name of the business. Usually, within a few days, Google will take your edit and look into it and then adjust their listing and de-rank them further down. It is not going to penalise them but to make sure that the search results remain accurate. It is going to push you higher because your competitors are ranking lower automatically.
7) Accurate NAP (Name Address Phone)
There are a lot of businesses. Make sure that your name, address, and phone number are accurate with the correct commas across the entire web. The road or street must be the same, and it has to match your google listing. If there are any discrepancies, Google’s algorithm struggles to deal with that and not account for a citation.
How are citations helpful?
Citations are essential to rank your business. You want to get as many citations as possible, but they have to be accurate, so you can run a search and find all the inaccurate search results and fix them.
While submitting your business to directories and other areas, make sure that you put a unique paragraph or piece of content for each one of the listings. Many people make a mistake by copying and pasting into the directory, which is a big problem. You will be de-indexed straight away, and the page is not going to count for Google. There is absolutely no point in submitting a listing that has just copied and pasted the text.
8) Press Releases
Press releases can be a quick article to your site. Get a copywriter to write up and talk about your product or service and something newsworthy. It needs to be something that would interest people, and then you can get it to publish across the region. People may choose to publish it, and it is just another great way to get more backlinks to your websites.
What do you need to remember?
Now, remember that every time you submit one of these articles, make sure your name, address, and phone number are mentioned because this will also count as a citation. Get a citation count as high as possible because this shows Google that so many websites are referencing you.
You can also include a link directly to Google My Business, and again that will show Google that the listing is accurate.
Ways To Do This:
HARO (Help A Reporter Out): https://www.helpareporter.com/
Register on this site, offer to help reporters, and get mentions. It seems simple but it is one of the best ways to get free links, traffic, exposure and improve branding. Always wondered how experts end up on the news? Well, here you go.
News Wire: https://www.newswire.com/
Expensive but works. They have a huge network and can get you in front of hundreds of thousands or millions of eyes.
9) Bing Places
Many people do not realise that Microsoft has its version of Google (my business) called Bing Places. Bing and Microsoft are competitors to Google.
How does it work?
Microsoft trusts anything that Google has in GMB. In the same way, you can submit a site to Google My Business and Bing Places. This is again just going to give you another listing. It shows Google that your business is legitimate. It is being verified again by a company, and it is all about building trust and rapport with the Google search algorithm.
10) Event Platforms
Submit your site to event websites, and there is a whole host of other sites. (Think Event Brite)
Why are you going to do this?
It will help if you create events as much as possible. Try to create an event that you think no one is ever going to show. You want to get people to show up at the event, but it is not the point. It will show Google that there is an event. So it is another opportunity to get your citation, your name, address, and phone number. If your services and events are attractive, then people may come to avail a great opportunity. Sell your product or service and show google that you are a legitimate business running a legitimate event at your actual premises.
11) Map Applications
Register your business with different maps applications; one of them is Waze. Waze is a google owned map where it shows you different routes when you are driving. To avoid traffic and other problems on the road, you can advertise your business to people driving home.
How does it work?
Download the Waze app and help your business grow. The unique thing about Waze is that you have to take photos at your location within the Waze app and walk by your physical premises for your listing to be approved. Google owns this company and trusts your company a lot more. Once it is approved, you physically have to go to that location because there are a lot of spam websites. Google tries to make sure that every listing on its platform is authentic, trusted, and used by the general public, so Waze is a huge opportunity.
12) YouTube Citations
When you submit videos to YouTube, you have got another opportunity on a google-owned platform to put your nap in the description. Many people have grown accustomed to putting links, and it is good to do and a great opportunity.
How do you do it?
It’s a video that people watch on YouTube and get so many views. You can quickly put up any video, and you will get 30 to 100 and sometimes thousands of views. You can put a link and your nap to your google map, not just to your website. Every time your company publishes a video, make sure you have got the nap. It’s just as important as putting the link back to your website.
13) Google indexing
Once you have created all of the different profiles, you need to create a page on your website. Now perhaps it is not on the home page, but you should put it on a subpage and put a link to every single one of your profiles. In the footer of your website, you need to link to that page, so you get some authority to it from the home page. So on that page, you can list your YouTube video, YouTube channel, your bling places, in fact, every social profile that has an address on it.
Why you do this?
A lot of these profiles can be de-indexed or not indexed at all by google. By linking from your website, you will create a connection between your website and those profiles. More importantly, get indexed by google and get credit and authority from those genuine profiles. You can submit a profile, but that doesn’t mean google trusts it, but when you link it from a website, it shows google that those profiles are trusted and genuine. Don’t forget to link back to your google my business listings and your nap.
14) Employment Portals
Submit your site to employment portals. When you publish a job, you are looking for a new job; use it as an opportunity to publish your name, address, and phone number.
Why you do this?
Again link to google my business profile; it is another highly trusted site. It is a highly used website because there is a massive influx of people looking for jobs. People can type your business name, and a single click on the google my business link can take them to your profile. Now it gets registered to google that you have got people from that website. The more users you have, the more awareness in Google’s mind to rank your profile.
15) Google Directions
Email and SMS direction links to your clients and staff when they are coming to your business location. When they have appointments or are coming to you, ask them to use the google maps link while driving!
Why you do this?
Most people are using Google Maps. If your people are using directions link to your business from different regions, google knows it. That’s telling google that people are coming to your business regularly. If the ratio of people approaching your business is higher than your competitors, it means google that more people are interested in your business. It helps your business increase ranking within a matter of hours.
If you focus and implement these tactics, you will outrank your business in Google search results.
Looking for an SEO Company Melbourne? Speak to our team to get your business growing!
