I know most of the SEO strategies that are available online which are focused on “one solution fits all marketing needs”. However, there are some unique local SEO strategies that are enough to meet specific marketing requirements of the business. Before you understand how unique local SEO strategies are going to help you increase your local search engine rankings, you should understand different factors that are considered by the giant search engines like Google for Local SEO rankings of the website.

Factors considered by Google for SEO rankings 

Google takes various factors into consideration to rank your business on the top of the Google search results.

Business factors: The search engine looks if your business title contains the search term and proximity of your business location to the user making the search. In addition, it also checks for the citations of your business and how closes the proximity to a home address. The search engine looks for keywords in the domain and titles. 

Review factors

These are other important factors that are considered by the search engine in deciding the search engine ranking of the website. In addition, these reviews also play a key role in influencing visitor purchase decision.  The search engine also looks for click-through rate in the website and website optimization for better user experience.

Local SEO audit

Your local SEO campaign should start with local SEO audit.  This audit runs with the objective of knowing your company’s current position and drafting a plan to stack up to the competition.

Google my business page optimization

Google my business page is the heart of Local SEO for any business. Efforts to run your Local SEO campaign effectively will start with Google my business page optimization.  To ensure that your business website will get consistent traffic, you should look through citations of the company to check for the consistency. The search engine collects the data from different data providers online and compares the data with information available with them to give the business credibility for search engine rankings.  By this, you should understand that keeping the NAP information consistent across all the citations is important for search engine rankings. If citations are found inconsistent and hindering traffic the traffic generated, effective measures will be placed to corrective actions like updating the information across citations, eliminating incorrect and duplicate citations.

Google algorithms keep changing from time to time and there are chances that your website is penalized if you are not updated with the changes and this could be the reason for low search engine rankings.   You should check to see if your website is penalized apart from verifying if your Google my business page is verified and listed in the right category.

Website optimization

After you know where you stand in the local SEO rankings, you should start optimization of your website for SEO purpose to make it rank better in the local SEO search results.

Cite NAP right

Apart from citing NAP right in the Google My business and citations, you should make sure that your dashboard on the website reflects NAP right. Google crawls the website to check the consistency of the information both on the website and Google My business page.

Site structure 

When you are targeting the local market through local SEO strategies, it is important to optimize the website as per the standards. If you are serving multiple locations, you should make sure you have separate pages for each location. Same is the case if your business is offering multiple service or products. The home page of the website should provide links to navigate to different pages easily. You should also optimize URL of the website to describe the physical location of the website.

Content optimization

Your content on the website should be optimized keeping both normal SEO and local SEO strategies. I mean, you have to optimize the content to be local-centric content on the webpage while following SEO guidelines when you are targeting the local customers. You should also optimize your business name located in the Meta title tag and Meta description.

Embed a Map on Your Landing Page

Google gives high priority to customer’s experience while ranking the search results, embedding a map to the landing page to make it easy for the users to locate your business. This strategy even adds a pinch in increasing your search results.

In summary, they are plenty strategies that you should focus on increasing local SEO rankings, the above-stated ones often unheard by many blog posts on the internet. Focus on these untold SEO strategies to increase your Local SEO rankings on major search engines.