If you have a local business, selling products or services, you have to think about the local ranking of your website. Local optimization will help you surface for related search queries in your area. As Google shows local results first in a lot of cases, you need to make sure Google understands where you are located. In this article, we’ll go over all the things you can do to improve Google’s understanding of your location, which obviously improves your chances to rank locally.
Ranking factors?
What are ranking factors? Well, ranking factors are elements that Google takes into account when determining the position of a URL in the search results. There are many ranking factors, most of them are characteristics of the URL and your website, but they can extend to your further online presence as well. An example of a ranking factor is page speed: a fast-loading page is likely to rank higher than a slow page when other characteristics are comparable.
Local ranking factors
In this post, we’ll focus on the factors that influence the ranking of your website’s pages in local searches. As you can read here, Google itself talks about local ranking factors in terms of:
- Relevance: are you the relevant result for the user? Does your website match what the user is looking for?
- Distance: how far away are you located? If you are relevant and near, chances are you’ll get a good ranking.
- Prominence: this is about how well your business is known. More on that at the end of this article.
So you have to show you’re relevant, you’re close by and you’re well-known. Let’s see how you can work on these factors with some concrete actions!
Be relevant
Being relevant means you offer the service or products the searcher is looking for. While this might seem pretty straightforward, sometimes people can get too cryptic on their website. So make sure that if you fully mention what you’re business or profession is, what kind of products and services you offer, and make sure to do this in the wording your audience uses. To find out if you do, please conduct some keyword research and simply speak with your customers to find out which terms they use when looking for a service like yours.
For more inspiration to write relevant content for your local business site, check out this local content strategy guide.
Google My Business
For your local ranking in Google, you can’t do without a proper Google My Business listing. You need to enlist, add all your locations, verify these and share some photos. Google My Business allows for customer reviews as well, and you should really aim to get some of those for your listing. Positive reviews (simply ask satisfied customers to leave a review) help the way Google and it’s visitors regard your business. This is pretty much like on your local market. If people talk positively about your groceries, more people will be inclined to come to your grocery stand.
Getting reviews is one. You can keep the conversation going by responding to these reviews and, as Google puts it, be a friend, not a salesperson.
LocalBusiness structured data
If you have a local business and serve mostly local customers, of course, you’ll add your address to your website. To help Google and other search engines understand that that is your main address you can beste serve it in a certain format that is readable for machines. Use localBusiness schema for that. Our Local SEO plugin makes adding that LocalBusiness schema to your pages a breeze!
This is very much about what Google calls distance. If you are the closest result for the user, your business will surface sooner.
Make sure you have one main NAP!
Even if your business has multiple locations, make sure to match the main NAP (name, address, phone number) on your website with the Google My Business NAP. That is the only way to make sure Google makes the right connection between the two. Add the main address on every page (you are a local business so your address is important enough to mention on every page). For all the other locations, set up a page and list all the addresses of your branches.
Facebook listing and reviews
What goes for Google My Business, goes for Facebook as well. Add your company as a page for a local business to Facebook here. People search a lot on Facebook as well, so you’d better make sure your listing on Facebook is in order. Facebook also allows for reviews, which could help your business too. Keep an eye on those reviews! If your reviews aren’t that great, make sure to fix that by providing better products or services, or at least show in your replies you take the feedback you get seriously.
City and state in title
The obvious one: for a local ranking, adding city and (in the US) state to your