A guide to getting started with local SEO, and learn how to improve your visibility in local search results and attract more customers in your area.
Ieva Treiliha
Every day, thousands of searches are made by potential customers looking for products and services in their local area. Local SEO is search engine optimisation with a focus on local searches, ensuring that people in your area find you when they are searching for products and services nearby.
Local SEO encompasses all the optimisations you implement to help your business achieve greater visibility and better keyword rankings for relevant searches in specific local areas. Local SEO is therefore relevant for all search engines, whether you aim to rank on Google, Bing or any other platform.
There are several ways a customer can find a local business: Google, Apple Maps, Tripadvisor, Yelp, Bing are just some of the many helpful methods. However, Google holds a 97% market share in Denmark, making it the largest and most widely used channel – and the one you should focus on most when it comes to local SEO.
So far, so good, but how do you start ranking for local searches in your area? You will find tips further down in this blog post. 🙂
Before you begin optimising for local searches near you, it is important to ensure one crucial thing – your website is mobile-friendly.
51% of online sales in Denmark come from mobile, and 61% of those searching on their mobile devices are more likely to contact a local business with a mobile-friendly website.
Mobile devices are the future, so it is vital that your website or webshop is mobile-friendly. You can read more about mobile optimisation and why it is especially important for online retail in my blog post about mobile shopping here.
An easy way to test if your website is mobile-friendly is to use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool. If your website is not mobile-friendly, you should first consider improving it. If that feels overwhelming, feel free to contact us here!
To rank locally, you should focus on locally-oriented searches. These are different from the keywords you would normally use for organic rankings.
Example:
Let’s say you are a glazier and want to reach potential customers near you. To rank highly locally, you should focus on keywords such as:
Once you have identified the relevant keywords you want to rank for locally, it is important that your website contains the necessary information for Google to display it. Specific local searches are displayed slightly differently by Google compared to regular search results. See examples below:
To find inspiration for keywords for local rankings, you can use a competitor’s name and see what Google suggests as related searches, or look at your existing keywords from a different angle – what would someone search for if they urgently needed to find your business?
Google My Business is essential for local ranking – it is perhaps the most important tool for local rankings. Google My Business helps customers find and contact you more easily.
Google My Business (GMB) collects the most important information a customer should know about your business: contact details, address, reviews and even FAQs. Google wants to show its users the most relevant and accurate results matching their queries, and with GMB, everything is displayed in one place.
Essentially, all you need to do is find/create your business and confirm you are the owner, then you can edit your business details. We actually have a guide to Google My Business, which you can find here!
Once you’ve set up a profile and filled in your business information on GMB, you have a solid foundation to be shown when people search for products and services in your local area. There are several factors that determine whether it is you or your competitor who appears in Google’s local results, but the most important is relevance.
In practical terms, relevance means for Google that your business has customer reviews, that the information you provide is correct, local citations, and a range of other factors.
Once you have your Google My Business profile in place, you can be featured in Google’s local results. Google’s local results, also known as the “Google 3 Pack” or “Local 3 Pack”, are the first results you see when searching for a location near you. Local results are the top three, most relevant results in your area. See the two examples below, where I search for “Lunch near me” and “Lunch Ikast”:
The results in the red box are, according to Google, the most relevant local results. The results you see just below are the regular organic search results. Data shows that local results get 33% of all clicks, and organic results get 40%. Therefore, as a business owner, it is attractive to appear in both the local results and high up on the first page of Google’s organic results.
Whether or not you are shown in Google’s local results depends largely on your GMB profile, but not only that. It is also important to remember Schema markup on your website.
Schema markup, or structured data, helps ensure Google understands the data on your website and can influence your organic keyword rankings.
Using structured data, Google can better see what the different landing pages on your website contain, and therefore also position your pages more effectively in the search results.
Today, working with structured data is not as complicated as it was a few years ago. You can advantageously use the Google Structured Data Markup Helper to tag data on your landing pages, after which the tool will generate a piece of code that you simply place in the correct location on your site.
If you are unsure whether Schema markup has been implemented on your website, you can always use the Google Structured Data Testing Tool to check if there is structured data on a page. If so, you can also see which information has been included.
An important on-page optimisation to remember for local SEO is landing pages. The landing pages you want to rank with should be optimised for local SEO.
On these selected landing pages, there should be a focus on a relevant keyword and location, e.g. Glazier Ikast. The most important places to optimise for local searches are your page title, meta description, your H-tags (headings), and the body text.
If you want to rank in multiple towns or areas, you should create landing pages tailored to each of these locations.
Let’s use the same example as before – let’s say you are a glazier in Ikast. If you want to rank in Ikast, but also in Herning and Brande, you should have landing pages optimised for searches for glazier Ikast, glazier Herning, and glazier Brande.
Link building is a major part of search engine optimisation, including when we talk about local SEO. Google sees links from other sites to yours as a form of recommendation – meaning that if other sites link to you, Google assesses that you have expertise and authority in your industry. Google wants to show its users the best and most relevant search results, so inbound links are crucial for your positions in search results.
To establish local authority, you should also focus on links from domains in your local area. A strong link profile with links from reputable local domains is important for your local keyword rankings. These could be news sites, local guides, and blog articles from bloggers in your region.
If you have a business in, for example, Herning, you can find various news media, guide/catalogue sites and bloggers from the local area and contact them about link building opportunities. They might want to write something about your business, set up a guest blog, or collaborate in other ways that suit both their channel and your brand. You can read more about link building here: How to do link building?
The key focus when you think about local SEO should be your content and its relevance.
It may seem like a lot to manage, but if you put yourself in your visitors’ shoes – wouldn’t it be important for you to find all this information if you were searching for a product or service in your local area?
If you feel that greater focus on local marketing is just what your business needs, you can read more about how WeMarket can help you with local SEO here! – A service we have developed for businesses looking to enhance their local marketing efforts.
If you have questions or need help with local SEO, you can contact us by filling out our contact form, or by calling 71 99 34 74.
At WeMarket, we offer businesses a benchmark report that compares their marketing efforts with their key competitors. You decide which competitors we should compare against.
We specialise in selling physical goods online and growing webshops – and now you can benefit from this expertise, even if you’re not already a client.
It’s completely free.
