How to Dominate Local Business Rankings with a Local SEO Strategy

What is local SEO strategy?

Local SEO is a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that focuses on improving your rankings in local search engine results pages (SERPs), so more people can find and visit your business. And local SEO strategy refers to the overarching strategy or process used to optimize your site content and online presence for higher rankings.

While traditional SEO boosts your visibility on a wider scale, local SEO focuses your efforts on attracting customers near your physical location — and getting them through your door.

The benefit of local SEO is that it lets you take advantage of increased visibility in your immediate area — and since 80% of local searches convert, it’s an extremely valuable strategy for 2020.

How does local SEO strategy work?

How does a local SEO strategy work to improve your local search rankings?

Google uses numerous factors when ranking local content, but it predominantly focuses on these three signals:

• Relevance: Does your business listing match the searcher’s intent?
• Distance: How close is your business to the searcher at the time of the search?
• Prominence: Is your business well-known both online and offline?

While you can’t alter your physical distance from a searcher, a robust local SEO strategy helps your business meet Google’s other ranking criteria, so you can greet local searchers at the top of results.

If a user conducts a search using a location or “near me” and your business listing best matches the query, you’ll appear in Google’s local SEO 3-pack — a listing of the top three local businesses that meet the search criteria.

Only the top three ranking listings will show up in the local SEO 3-pack, so you’ll need a custom local SEO strategy for 2020 if you want to earn a spot.

12 local SEO strategy tips to boost rankings and revenue

Now that we covered some local SEO strategy basics, let’s take a look at twelve strategies you can use to turbocharge your local search performance in 2020.

1. Optimize your local listings and citations

To rank in 2020 for local search results, you’ll first need to claim your Google Business Profile (GBP) listing.

This listing contains key information about your business and location — and Google uses GBP listings to pull information for the local SEO 3-pack. That’s why this local SEO strategy tip is crucial for getting your company to show up in local SERPs.

If you already claimed your GMB profile, take time to optimize it by adding information like:

• Business name
• Address
• Phone number
• Products and services you offer
• Photos of your business

After you optimize your GBP, start building citations on local directory sites like:

• Yelp
• Manta
• Yellowbook.com
• Angieslist
• MerchantCircle

When submitting local citations, make sure your name, address, and phone number (NAP) information is consistent in order to rank in relevant results.

Bonus Tip: Try out our LocalFX tool to make managing your local citations a cinch!

2. Understand your local personas

Next, you need to fully understand local customers — and generating marketing personas can help.

Start by asking yourself these questions:

• Who buys your product or service locally?
• Why do they purchase your product or service?
• What do they love about your product or service?
• Who talks about your products or services in the community?
• Who in your region do you want to buy your products or services?

Create a detailed list of what your ideal customers look like. Include their ages, work positions or titles, industry, local spending habits, and any other demographic information you think would influence their conversions, such as local events they’re likely to attend.

Understanding your key personas helps you write relevant and targeted local content for 2020.

3. Conduct local keyword research

A successful local SEO strategy includes keyword research.

Spending time researching keywords may seem daunting, especially when you have so many things on your mind. But keyword research allows you to uncover valuable phrases locals search, related to your business, products, and services.

Keywords connect consumers’ questions to your content. Including local keywords in your content tells Google that your content is relevant to local searchers, which in turn helps rank your content higher and increases your visibility in your area.

Search intent

When conducting keyword research, it’s important to understand searchers’ intent when they type specific keywords and phrases. Google wants to rank content that best matches a searcher’s query, so understanding the intent behind local searches will help your business rank higher in search results in 2020.

Instead of guessing the intent of the keyword you’d like to target, all you have to do is search for it on Google and see what kind of content ranks. A lot easier than you thought, right?

As an added perk, Google even suggests similar keywords that you can include in your content to rank for those as well.

Don’t forget about researching keywords with “near me,” when targeting keywords. These are your local keywords. They’re the essence of local SEO, and you want to rank for them. We recommend targeting keywords that include towns in a five-mile radius of your location.

Keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Keyword Tool can help you conduct local research in-depth in the coming years. They can help you determine which keywords you and your competitors already rank for in local search results too.

Types of keywords

When researching keywords, it’s useful to know about the three main categories of intent.

• Informational: “What’s camera aperture?”
• Navigational: “Camera equipment store near me”
• Transactional: “Buy camera under $300?”

Knowing what type of intent the queries belong to will help you generate more specific content relevant to your chosen keywords.

Navigational and transactional are often the categories that local keywords fall into. Navigational keywords help your local clients find your business. Transactional keywords help them purchase your local products and services.

Keywords also vary in length. Head terms are short, one to three words in length. These keywords tend to be very competitive to rank for. Think about it, how many companies are trying to rank for “best camera”?

Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are much less competitive. These keywords are more conversational and often start with what, how, when, where, or which. These are the types of keywords that users search when performing a voice search — “Where can I get my camera lens fixed near me?”

Local keywords fall into this category.

Long-tail keywords are becoming a critical SEO trend because they show user intent much better than head terms. And because they appear in voice searches, which are estimated to grow to 50% of all searches by 2020, Google is putting greater emphasis on long-tail keywords.

The recent BERT update is just one example of the increasing focus, which means that local SEO will see a huge boost from the update in the near future.

4. Earn backlinks from local sources

Google considers the number and quality of backlinks — or links from other sites to your website — when ranking content. That means you’ll need to consider backlinks as part of your local SEO solution for next year.

The purpose of backlinks is twofold.

1. They help searchers navigate the Internet
2. They demonstrate your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) to search engines

Some backlinks carry more weight than others, depending on the linking site’s trustworthiness and authority online.

In other words, a link to one of your pages from Time Magazine has more weight to Google and users than a link from a newly created blog.

To boost your local SEO strategy for 2020, consider earning backlinks from reputable, local sources. Local backlinks will increase your brand’s recognition in your area. And since people trust local influencers, your credibility will increase by leaps and bounds in the eyes of potential clients.

One of the best ways that you can gain local backlinks in the coming year is to attend or host local events related to your business. If you own a local videography company, a film festival would be a great example!

Local events are often covered by local news agencies, which will link back to your site when they cover the story.

Local events will also generate mentions on social media attendees, boosting your brand awareness even more.

You can start creating local backlinks by:

• Generating and promoting local content
• Asking local influencers and news sources to share your content
• Earning reviews and mentions from local customers

Bonus tip: Use tools like Ahrefs to analyze your backlink profile and monitor competitors’ local backlinks.

5. Write in-depth, local content

When it comes to local SEO ranking factors in 2020, content is extremely important. Just using keywords and links won’t rank your content like it did in the days of yesteryear, so if you want that #1 spot, you need to generate quality, in-depth content.

And not just any content. You have to be writing good content, and good content has some criteria.

• Good content supplies demand. If it doesn’t meet demand, it will not be considered good content. If users aren’t finding an answer to something they’re looking for within your content, they’re not going to read it no matter how well you write it.
• Good content is easy to navigate. It will have links that users can follow, both to navigate to it and other relevant information. Good content is no better than bad content if users can’t navigate it easily. Without links, the user’s ability to access will drop, and with it, your conversion rate.
• Good content is easy to digest. It is unique, informative, and easy to read. Your content should have proper grammar and sentence structure, as well as a conversational writing style. Ranking content is also scannable, with relevant headlines, short paragraphs, and bulleted lists to give users a comfortable reading experience.
• Good content matches user intent. The topic of your content should be extremely narrow. It should address a specific question and match the users’ intent behind the keywords you want to rank for.

The quality of content works exactly the same way for local SEO as it does for standard SEO, the primary difference being that local content is generated for topics your local clients want to know about.

These topics have to be heavily local-focused, information that can only be found about the surrounding area. If it is information that is well-known nationally, local consumers will likely find that information elsewhere. Here’s how to do it.

• Step one: Create content using PAA: Start by creating posts using frequently asked questions about concerns in your area. These will show up in the People Also Ask (PAA) Featured Snippet in Google’s SERPs. You can later develop an FAQ page on your website using these questions and other questions your local clients frequently ask.

• Step two: Put essential information at the beginning: Remember that your content should be unique and easily digestible. Front-load your information so that readers can access the essential parts quickly.
• Step three: Set up an outline: Include headlines that are unique and relevant to your topic, which will help make your content scannable. Don’t overwhelm your users, but do keep it longer, at least a 1000 words — readers like being able to read all the information at once.
• Step four: Make readers want to act: Finally, include a robust and straightforward call to action (CTA) that will get readers to make a move.

What about your local services?

One of the first things you should create — if you haven’t already — when generating local content is a separate local service page for each of your products and services. On each page, condense the essence of your local service into a few words. You can do this by:

• Including a list of features about the service, and making a note of why it’s unique and how users can benefit from it when buying locally
• Keeping your features and benefits separate

It’s all too easy to allow the two to merge into synonyms. Keeping them separate will enable you to target local consumers more efficiently. What’s the difference?

• Features are the technical aspects of your service
• Benefits are the way those features help users accomplish what they want

For consumers, benefits trump features. How the product fulfills a need or desire will sell better than knowing what the parts of the product are. Knowing that a camera takes brighter pictures at night is much more important to consumers than knowing that it has an aperture of f/1.8.

When writing about the benefits of your products and services include:

• Tangible benefits
• Intangible benefits
• Commercial benefits

Benefits also include how the product or service reduces a pain the user might have. In particular, consider any local pains that your service could alleviate.