What are Local Search Ranking Factors That Can Affect Your Website Rankings on Search Engines?
How to Improve Your Local SEO Rankings?
Google has recently announced that it will be reducing the weight of local listings in search results, as a means to ensure that people are more likely to see local results when they perform searches on Google and other related search engines like Bing and Yahoo! With this announcement, the role of local search engine optimization (SEO) has become even more important than ever before, especially for small businesses who may not have an online presence yet or whose website doesn’t show up at the top of the SERPs. Now, it is very important for businesses, especially startups to know what is Local SEO?
What is Local SEO?
Local Search Engine Optimization (LSEO) is a process by which websites can improve their position in the results of Google and other search engines for local searches. The main goal of LSEO is to increase the visibility and rankings of a website within reachable distance from the searcher’s location. There are many ranking factors that can contribute to a site’s overall ranking, but some of the most important ones include: Titles, Description tags, H1 tags, backlinks from relevant domains/pages and on-page SEO elements like titles, meta descriptions etc.
What are Local Search Ranking Factors That Can Affect Your Website Rankings on Search Engines?
Google’s algorithms check for some factors associated with a website/URL before assigning a position to display your webpage. The better your website’s ranking, the more it has the potential to be read by the users who are searching for similar services or products that your own website intends to sell. Ranking factors can also include the quality of the content on the page, links to the website, incoming and outgoing links, domain authority, and more. To optimize a website for a better local SEO ranking, it is important to understand the different local search ranking factors and how they can be used to improve a website’s overall ranking on a local search engine.
How to Improve Your Local SEO Rankings?
When you are looking to improve your local SEO ranking, it is important to make sure that you are following a rigorous and strategic approach and tap all potential channels which can help boost your rankings. While there are a variety of local search ranking factors that you can act on in order to boost your site’s ranking, the following five are of the utmost importance.
- Use Relevant Keywords: First and foremost, you need to conduct keyword research in order to target relevant keywords that your site can rank for. Additionally, make sure you are optimizing your pages for the best Google search engine results. With optimized pages, you will gain higher rankings for your target keywords. In order to boost your local rankings, your content on the website must have keywords containing regional pointers such as locality name, region, and city, etc.
- Build Quality Backlinks: You need to build quality links to your website. This means creating positive links to your site from high-quality websites. Building links will help to enhance your site’s ranking and credibility.
- Create and Manage Social Media Profiles: You need to manage your site’s social media presence. This means being proactive and responsive to comments and feedback on your site’s social media pages. Doing so will help to win the hearts and minds of potential customers.
- Create Google My Business Profile: It is very essential to create a Google My Business profile so that people can easily locate your business using Google maps and also you can collect user ratings and reviews left by your happy and local customers.
- List Your Business in Local Directories: Listing your business in local directories will not only attract more leads towards your business, but also Google collects the info provided by local listings how relevant and authenticated a business is. It also gives more visibility to your products and services and relay this info to Google search engines to help you rank higher.
Overall, a rigorous and strategic local SEO ranking approach is essential for achieving the highest possible rankings for your site. If you are unable to find someone who can help you with all these factors, get in touch with our experts at Widepool.