Your local SEO improvement plan should contain both short and long-term goals to keep you ranking high in local SEO. Local SERPs are notoriously competitive, but these hacks will help your local business increase your online visibility.
1. Optimize Your Google My Business Page
Establishing and optimizing a Google My Business Page is an easy and essential ranking factor for local SEO. Google My Business helps your business appear in Google search results and on Google maps, which are both crucial to local SEO. To ensure your Google My Business Page is optimized to offer the best performance:
- Make sure you claim your listing
- Follow-through the steps to verify your account
- Review the details of your business to ensure they are up-to-date and accurate. Common mistakes include incorrect category listings, address typos, and having the wrong opening hours.
- Include a link to your website.
- Upload or refresh high-quality business images with a focus on making your business appear as attractive and welcoming as possible.
Customer reviews are crucial to complete the optimization of your Google My Business page and will also help drive your local SERPs.
2. Evergreen Content
The importance of evergreen content is critical for building excellent links, ranking for essential keywords, and building organic traffic over time. Evergreen content remains relevant to readers, regardless of seasons or news cycles.
Evergreen content customized with the right keywords keeps organic traffic flowing to your site, without the need to change the content frequently. New content plays an important role in SEO. After all, your customers or clients want to see new blog topics and other relevant and engaging information. However, out-of-date content won’t rank on Google and could do more harm than good.
Evergreen content is the most crucial part of establishing website authority. Publishing high-quality content about your field or industry helps you showcase your authority and experience. Establishing authority in your niche is also important to building trust with your audience. Other benefits of evergreen content include:
- Search engines like Google can recognize evergreen content and rank it accordingly
- Increased web traffic
- Lead generation
- A longer shelf-life will improve the number of links to the content
To create excellent evergreen content you need to find keywords with a substantial search volume related to your goods or services. Once you have established the keywords, build topics for blogs and other content that can easily and organically incorporate those words. Remember, Google is looking for content that provides value to users. Making sure the content you provide is both engaging and valuable is crucial to your overall SEO.
Long-tail keywords
In addition to your keyword research, you need to find long-tail keywords that rank well and are applicable to your business. If you haven’t heard of long-tail keywords before, don’t worry, it’s a simple concept.
Long-tail keywords are longer, specific keyword phrases that help distinguish what makes your business unique. For example, if your business is a roofing company in a major city, it will be hard to rank well for “roofing.” Using long-tail keywords such as “rubber roofing in New York City,” attracts organic traffic interested in your specific service. Long-tail keywords should be a fundamental part of your evergreen content as they help establish customized communication lines between yourself and your target audience.
3. Use Schema Markup
Schema Markup is a form of microdata, which makes annotating HTML elements with tags much simpler and faster. When added to your webpage, it creates a rich snippet, which is an enhanced description, to appear in search results. Schema Markup is a result of a collaboration between top search engines like Google and Yahoo.
Enhanced descriptions make your webpage appear more prominent in SERPs, and there is some evidence that it improves click-through rates. SEO improvement is always about playing the long-game, but Schema Markup can offer fast results on improved traffic.