What it takes to do Local Business SEO in 2018

We’re going to break down what it takes to do local business SEO as of right now in 2018.

I just feel like people are really over complicating SEO right now and they’re getting all hung up on all these different things. I just want to break down over the next series of articles not just this one for you of what you need to do to rank right now with local SEO.

Even if you don’t have an SEO optimized business right now but you’re thinking about going into it and doing some sort of marketing or strategy & consulting for local a business then this video is gonna be perfect for you. A great way for you to get started and if you’re already doing it but you just need a little more clarity then this is also gonna help you also,  it’s just gonna be a nice walk through for you.

Starting local business SEO the right way

So everything starts with the website, first off you have to have things right on the website and what I mean by that is you need to have your keywords in the right spots you need to make sure you’re building them italicized, having the right H1 tags H2 tags so on and so forth. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means at this second. We can get into that this stuff  and it might sound kind of confusing right now if you’re new to this but will definitely help you clarify them with a good understanding of what Local SEO is and how to optimize for it.

First off before we get started a common question I get often is “I have a website designer guy, can you do the SEO for me?” The answer is not so simple but i can assure the answer is most likely a no, if the website hasn’t been built yet.

First off its best to give the job to same person so your website can be built with SEO in mind when its coded and structured. You wouldn’t want to have the SEO optimizer to basically undo and redo what the website builder has already done, it is frustrating and not a officiant way of working. Besides if you have the same person designing your website and doing the seo optimizing then that person would be more appreciative and work harder for you.

When you do it yourself and you actually get going with it you’re gonna find that you can see a lot of results just by doing this stuff, some other on-page factors that you might want to consider.

In order to save time you want to make sure that you have good content in place not duplicate content and you want to make sure that it’s engaging content. At the end of the day that’s what Google is really trying to do, they’re trying to end the search for the consumers so when the consumer comes to your website do they get exactly what they need? do they get exactly what they’re looking for? If You can deliver that to them and you stop their search ultimately, Google is going to reward you by putting you in a higher position. That  most of the times is a lot of the challenge when working with a local business owners so you want to make sure you have a good strategy in place to generate leads but at the same time make sure you’re delivering valuable content.

Some other things you might want to consider with the website that can do a lot are structure and how you store to the website. Meaning are the pages intertwined (Sitemap, Internal Links) together do you have some sort of silo structure going on and again if you don’t know what that means that’s okay we’re going to break that down for you.

Local Business SEO Citations

Next thing we’re going to talk about is having your business information or your clients information on other sites, so we call this citations and that’s the business name, address and phone number. Directory sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, hot frog stuff like that press releases that’s a very good way to get Local Business SEO Citations. So when you take it and pin it inside of an image and then also having that information on the website as well. You want that information whatever it matches here to be on the website as well and that’s going to ensure that Google is seeing all that data and it’s matching together. So if it doesn’t match you’re gonna create confusion so Google is not going to know if you’re the same business and you’re not gonna get credit for all that effort, you want to make sure that they’re consistent in that and they match throughout.

Local Business SEO boosted by Reviews

the next thing I want to talk to you about kind of coincides with this stuff but it’s reviews. When you’re working with a local business owner you want to make sure that they’re able to drive reviews  not only to their Google Places or Google my business,  you want to have reviews coming in not only from there but also from the directory sites like Yelp and stuff like that those are views are going to add more Authority and more social proof and that’s also going to affect your ranking with local SEO in 2018.

Social Media Markers to boost Local SEO in 2018

the next factor I want to talk to you about is social things like your Facebook page, Twitter fan page, YouTube. You want to have all your social pointing to your website and you want to also have that name address phone number on the social stuff as well and it’s even reviews like on your Facebook page. You can drive reviews from there as well, that’s all gonna be some social proof and indicators that Google is looking for, they want to see so when you provide that stuff.

It’s going to also add some more Authority for you.

Link Building

Last but not least, link building (links going to your site). Not saying that you have to focus on things in this specific order that I laid out but usually a good place to start is with the website and then work your way around all of this stuff. if you haven’t noticed, it is basically intertwined.

All this stuff is basically going to depend on one another and that’s why the website was mentioned is so important. Because if you’re sending a link to the website and you have it structured properly with a good silo structure, sending that link to one page on your website is going to affect the entire link building SEO structure.. So this is a ecosystem that works together with each other and this is what I consider the local SEO ecosystem.

When you implement all of these strategies and you do it the right way, consistently you’re going to see awesome results.

You can do a lot of this without even doing any of the work yourself, outsource of a large part of this type of project.  You can outsource a large part of the link building, the citations and some of the setup you can do yourself because it’s just so easy. Importance of all this stuff and how it correlates together