Local SEO Ranking Factors 2018 - Local SEO Guide

Local SEO has become one of the essential components to make your business successfully online. It helps you to promote your services to the local audience in your area at the exact time when they want your service.

With the rise of smartphone usage and better connectivity, every business and brand that wants long-term success across search engines are investing heavily in Local search engine optimization services. Local ranking factors like name, address, contact number, and customer reviews will surely help your business to rise to the top of organic results and indeed get featured in the carousel.

So, to make your business stand out, here are some of the local SEO ranking factors you can consider.

Local SEO Ranking Factors for 2018

Keywords Count in Local Rankings

Selecting the right keyword is important as people used them to search your business. Always give a thought about what keywords or queries would a customer write when they would look for services that you offer. Avoid jargons. Use your city’s name or familiar city names along with the keywords that you have finalised. Also, be sure to include your city name in the Meta and Title of your website.

Google My Business and Bing Places for Business Pages

Businesses can list themselves in the Google and Bing listings so that the likelihood of showing up in SERP’s increases for your local searches. Listing your business will not only show up for every device but will also give you exposure on Google Maps.

Get your businesses verified for these two search giants. Fill in as much as company information – including the logo, pictures, opening hours, types of payments accepted, etc.

If you haven’t claimed your pages on Google and Bing, this is the primary task for you to start with. Here are some of the guidelines given by Google to follow.

Business Directories

Remember the old Yellowbook? Your online business directories serve the same purpose. Many high-quality business directories rule the top SERP’s. Search for some salon like Best Hair Salon in Leicester and you will see that the first page of Google is almost exclusively filled with online business directories.

Online directories such as Yelp, Foursquare, and MerchantCircle, are one of the great ways to get backlinks to any business website. Google considers many of these "citation" sites as quality, trustworthy websites. Owing to this your business can enjoy high search results on the search engines.

Reputation: 5-Star Reviews work Wonders for your Business

What do you see first when you decide on purchasing a product or service? The 5-Stars, right? It is very true that online reviews play a very vital role in converting potential customers into leads.

"As per sources, 73% of consumers say that

positive reviews make them trust a local business more."

They not only correlate with higher local rankings, but positive reviews can also help you get customers. So, how will you get reviews from your happy customers? Just ask them to review your business.

Backlinks Are a Good Thing

Getting quality backlinks to your site is important. It helps you add credibility to your site in the eyes of the search engines. You should check the site's quality by checking in the URL for high domain authority (DA), high page authority (PA) and lower spam score.

Mobile Signals

The next factor that you must look for on local search is Mobile Signals / Behavioural signals. This shows how many times does a listing gets clicked, how many checks ins have been done from mobile, latest offers, CTR’s, etc. For all this, your website must be mobile optimised so that your website appears properly on smartphones and other devices and help you create a better presence of Businesses and outreach new customers.

We all know that local SEO is very important. It helps you channelize your local SEO campaigns in an optimized fashion. So, keep a pulse of the SEO checklist and related local SEO strategies to take your business to the next level. You can even consider hiring local search engine optimization services to double fold your results.

Learn more about how your local business can benefit from SEO. We at TESTQ Technologies provide affordable SEO Services that

focus on optimizing a website for a specific city, region, or for the locations of physical stores and shops. Join hands with us and see your business getting positioned on search engines so that you’re seen by potential customers.