Where do you find your local hot spots of goodies and services? Here are 4 SEO marketing tips to become the next local go-to spot when someone searches for your product or service.

If you were searching for a business to satisfy your needs (i.e. Mexican restaurants, office supplies, plumbing services), what would you do? 

My go-to is Google or Maps to find nearby goods and services. I don’t know about you, but I also usually cut off my options after page two or three of the search results, and being in digital marketing, I don’t pay attention to the top few ad results other than to see who’s paying to be there. 

That’s where SEO comes into play–especially if you’re a local business!

SEO, search engine optimization, has a lot of different elements to it and it can easily get very technical. 

In layman’s terms, all you’re doing is optimizing your website to be found and selected by a search engine, such as Google, to appear, ideally, within the first ten results on the search engine results page (SERP). 

SEO Marketing Tips for the Locals

The goal is to increase your ‘organic’ traffic which is loaded with prospects. Then, once they’re on your website, you’ll want to optimize the user experience and engage with them to convert them into leads. Click here to see how blog writing services can help you engage and convert visitors into leads.

If you’re looking to get into blogging for SEO, download our Blogging Checklist for Beginners here. 

SEO Marketing Tip #1: Keyword Research & Mapping

Keyword research and mapping is one of the elements I would tackle first to start ranking locally. 

There are several tools and strategies to help you do this, but my process is fairly simple: Google Adwords Keyword Planner > selecting 10-15 high search volume with low or medium competition > adding the name of local cities to that and ensuring those keywords are appropriately placed throughout your website and/or blog.

SEO Marketing Tip #2: On-page SEO

On-page SEO is super important to SEO, in general, let alone optimizing it for local SEO–at least in my experience. On-page SEO has a lot to do with setting up the backend of your website page, for the most part. 

Below are five areas of on-page SEO, I would look at adding your local keywords to, including:

• Meta description–this is about one to two sentences that give searches a snippet glance of what the result/content they may click on is about.
• Linking–link reputable external and relevant internal links naturally throughout the text 
• Alt text–this applies to the images you have on your page. I would include the keyword, and succinctly describe the photo 
• URL–make sure the keyword you choose for a specific page is placed naturally throughout the content and in the URL.

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