The Complete Guide to Local SEO in 2020

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1. Improve Your Websites Speed

While this is actually important for all types of SEO, it’s one of the most critical things companies can do to help improve search results in 2020 and that includes local businesses. In America, there are over 600 million blog pages created each year. That’s enough for every man woman and child in the country. Google made a huge shift in the last few years, to push the internet towards USER FRIENDLY EXPERIENCES. Your websites speed and especially mobile speed are now 100% verified signals for ranking factors. If you and a competitor both rank for the exact same keyword, the site with better speed will always win. 

There are several things you can do to improve your websites speed and performance:

Test your site and page speed using a free tool like Page Speed Insights.

Deploy a CDN, or content delivery network to your site. Free CDN’s like cloudflare are available and easy to set up.

Implement page speed best practices using a caching tool. If your using a CMS like Wordpress or a web based site builder, most platforms now have plugins for this.

If you want to improve your site speed and on-page SEO, you can use our Free Website Audit Tool and get detailed recommendations on improving your websites performance.

2. Optimize Your On-Page Content with Geographic Search Terms

This is a very powerful, yet simple strategy any local business can use. Let’s say your have an AC repair business in Toluca Lake, CA (a suburb of Los Angeles). Instead of optimizing your titles, meta descriptions, headers and content with AC Repair Company, or AC Repair Company Los Angeles (which is a huge land mass), consider changing that title to AC Repair Company Serving Toluca Lake. 

First, if you’ve ever been to L.A. and know how big it is, you know that no one is going to order an AC repairman to come to the Toluca Lake neighborhood if that business is located in Long Beach. Second, if you use the neighborhood modifier, Google will now try to show that content to people specifically in that neighborhood, which not only makes it easier to rank but will send you higher quality customers. 

3. Add Location Pages to your Website

If your business has more than one location, creating location pages is a must. Location pages provide customers and search engines specific content to display your business's location and offerings in more than one place across the web. You can also do this if your a single location, but serve multiple areas. You can create multiple service area pages each with unique content for that location. 

4. Create Local Content

In a major shift for our industry, search engines are finally getting smart enough to understand the user's intent, meaning businesses can finally create content for people (not just for search engines, which wasn’t always the case). This means it’s mission critical for businesses to stop only focusing on general content for mass audiences, but rather create localized content which enables them to become the local leader. Businesses that are focusing on being helpful and providing value, not just creating content around what they sell are going to see huge gains over the latter in 2020.

5. Update Your Website Design

This is a simple exercise. Step one, look at your website on a desktop, think about how it makes you feel, step two, look at your website on your phone, think about how it makes you feel, and step 3, thinking about step one and step two, think about what your business does. If your website makes you feel confident and your site makes it easy for people in the local market to do business with you, your in good shape, if it’s anything but, it’s probably time to update your website.

Having a well designed, mobile friendly isn’t just a good idea, it’s a must for improving local SEO. Trust us, if you still have an old junky website built by your brother in laws cousin, Google knows and so do your customers.

A simple explanation of what were referring to is as follows: In order for search engines and customers to find you, you need to make it easy for them. To do this, there is some basic information they will need. Your business name, address and phone number. 

For your customers, this information should be clearly visible both on your website and in your Google My Business listing. 

For search engines, you want to make sure the information on your site is in HTML/Text form so it can read it. In other words, don’t post a picture of your NAP (name address phone number). You’ll also want to make sure this information is registered with about 30 (minimum) Directory Sites, also known as directory listings across the internet with information that is consistent with what’s on your site and GMB page.

In addition, you can download our list of the top 30 local seo listing directories here, or consider purchasing a service to help you create the listings. 

Every time you create a new listing, your creating a citation for your business description + NAP. Your also creating a backlink to your company from a powerful website that has high relevance scores. To help you keep track, you can also download our Local Listings Checklist Template.

Build links through partnerships

Sponsor local events

Link outreach to guest blogs

Host your own event or webinar through a third party

Answer FAQ’s on sites like reddit or quora

These are just a few. You can also talk to a professional company that can help you create a link building strategy for Local SEO. 

1. Local Listings - Moz Local, provides a great free local listings audit tool to see which directories your currently listed on and which ones need work.

2. Links & On-Page SEO - One of our favorites is a desktop program called Screaming Frog, which is free for up to 500 URLS. You can map out all of your inbound and outbound links, analyze your titles, meta descriptions, and content very quickly.

2. Analyzing Results - Google Analytics and Google My Business provide valuable insights on how customers find you, your traffic, and your reviews.

4. Identify Keywords & Relevant Topics - Ubersuggest is a super intuitive and user friendly keyword research tool. Paired with a resource like buzzsumo, you can discover easy to rank for relevant topics and keywords to help guide your content.

5. All-In-One Solution - For those seeking a DIY solution, BrightLocal is probably the best tool out there for small business owners that want to work on their local SEO themselves but need a central platform. There is a cost for the service, but it’s probably the most affordable solution for any DIYer.