5 Practical Tips for Using Local SEO to Reach your Potential Audience

Whether you’re a restaurant, a florist, a doctor, a garment manufacturer, or someone who’s exclusively B2B, your business will increasingly live or die by its digital efforts.

While digital investments cannot be measured in online results only, even if a sale is made at your brick and mortar store, chances are research was conducted online, comparisons made, reviews checked, and social media consulted at some point.

In a major push to drive relevant local results, Google is now sending out search signals ((based on IP detection) that maintains accurate local business data, is veritable and complete.

Following are ways by which you can use Local SEO to your advantage:

Get Mobilegeddon-ed

As smartphone usage continues to increase drastically, you are in a mobilegeddon-ed zone if not already affected.

It only makes business sense to tap into consumers who are spending over 15 hours per week navigating for information via their smartphones. If not, your competitors already are taking advantage. That means, being mobile friendly, can not only improve your click-through rate, but increase both, rankings and revenue.

Google My Business should be your Business

You will also want to tap into and optimize your Google My Business. After all 63% of search takes place here and here is what the search giant suggests you to do –

• To add your business location accurately on the map
• Make sure your NAP is correct; Name, Address, and Phone numbers (you might want to double check on this)
• Add hours of operation and payment types
• Add your official site on the Google+ Local page
• Make sure to utilize specific categories, keywords and descriptions of your business
• Encourage reviews

Get Listed on Canadian Directories

The following are the major business directories in Canada, that you should get listed on-

Ø  Google Canada

Ø  Bing Canada (Includes Yahoo and Nokia Prime Places):

Ø  Yelp Canada

Ø  Foursquare

Ø  Kijiji

Ø  Ic.Gc.ca

Ø  Yellow Pages Canada

Ø  411. ca

Ø  Profile Canada

Ø  WebLocal

Create Relevant On Site Signals

You can give your local optimization a boost by creating the right on-site signals that Google expects to have. These are fundamental in correctly optimizing for local areas:

• Inclusion of City and State in your title tag and H1 heading is an important signal to show local relevancy.
• Inclusion of City and State in your onsite content (something most sites are either not aware or forget to work on). The logic here is simple, unless you’re not talking about your local area in your content, it will not show up to local visitors.
• Inclusion of City and State in your alt text images and URL. A bonus point here: when updating your URLs, do not forget to set up 301 redirects so that the old address points out to the new one completely.

Monitor your Progress

Stay up to date to other local blogs, talks on social media, and monitor on SERPs on a regular basis to watch your progress. If you’re in doubt, go back to the basics of internet marketing and be sure you’re participating in all that make you more newsworthy in your local market. In short, participate in activities that add visibility for you.

Last, but not the least, keep working to improve your organic rankings via valuable, well-optimized content and incoming links from other ranked websites.