Getting Started with Local SEO | Velocity Agency | New Orleans

Whether you are a new SEO employee in your company or a local business owner trying to get on search engines to stand a chance against your competitors, this brief introduction to local SEO can be beneficial to anyone committed to entering the local market.

To begin, let’s address some quick characteristics on how search engines rely on local SEO. Basically, search engines rely on local content that release a signal to notify search engines of that location being specified and in turn, search engines read this and index, or apply, the information accordingly using a unique algorithm. There are a few key areas of local SEO that you need to focus on to take full advantage of local SEO: on-page, local profiles, and inbound links/citations.

On-Page Local SEO

Here are some quick, helpful, but essential on-page local SEO tips you can take advantage of to optimize your website for local SEO.

1. Set up NAP – for every page on your website, make sure to include your name, address, and phone number as crawlable HTML text. Avoid the common mistake of putting this information within an image. In an image, it would not be crawlable to Google and would basically not be there at all.
2. Create location pages – every website should include a sort of contact page that includes information on the location of your business. You can embed a Google Map of your office to the page with NAP information also on the page.

Local Profiles

A presence of quality local profile pages can be seen as one of the most important parts of a well optimized Local SEO campaign. Start with some of the big names:

• Google Places
• Bing Places
• Yahoo Local

For each of these profiles, make sure you completely optimize them with basic information on your business (name, location, hours of operation, business description, website URL, imagery). Today, Google makes creating your local profile even easier by integrating your Google Places with Google+ page. Make sure you also choose a proper business category for your Google+ page as well.

Inbound Links and Citations

Inbound links are basically what the word says – they are links from another domain going back to your site (inbound!). Citations are a little different from inbound links – they represent mentions of your business name, address, and phone number on other domains, but don’t necessarily have to link back to your website.  Here are some helpful tips to consider for inbound links and citations when doing your local SEO campaign:

1. Ensure consistency of your business information across the web – could not stress this point enough. Very important for the future prominence of your business on the online word. Google values consistency of your business information highly and inaccuracies can lead to problems in how your local profiles show on search results.
2. Build quality directory citations – you can utilize the below map aggregators to populate map data for Apple, Yelp, Bing, and Google+. (Make sure the citations are consistent with your business info!!)

• • Express Update
  • Insider Pages

That should be a solid grasp of an introduction of local SEO to jumpstart your business. Make sure to always maintain consistency of your NAP and encourage customers to leave reviews on your local profiles. Best of luck on your long term SEO success.

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Velocity Agency is a digital marketing and advertising firm specializing in digital and internet marketing & advertising, print, web design, graphic design, film, and HD video promotion and post-production. Velocity serves clients all over the United States from our Metairie, LA office just outside of New Orleans by strategically implementing proprietary tools and techniques to get you the most conversions for your business through lead generation, cost-per-acquisition, and top line revenue.