Solving Local SEO Challenges

5 Solutions to Boost Your SEO

For corporate companies, local SEO may be difficult as it requires understanding national SEO, creating a Google Business Profile, and being familiar with how Google responds to your most important search queries across different geographies.

For enterprise search marketers, this implies there are a limitless amount of local SEO issues. What then are the most typical difficulties in business local SEO? Let’s investigate. 

• Local vs National SEO

One of the major issues businesses confront is understanding whether to concentrate on a local SEO service plan rather than a national SEO approach—and vice versa. This is understandable because it’s not always clear which of your priorities is best served by which. Determining if your desired top keywords have local intent can be difficult.

But, it’s crucial to the success of your overall strategy since it will have a big influence on how successfully your activities satisfy your corporate objectives. It is useful to know which keywords Google considers local when creating a keyword strategy and deciding how to approach and support your SEO effort. Good website design and a powerful SEO strategy are key to boosting website traffic.

Local Search Intent

Understanding search intent helps you decide what information to prioritize and what features will display in search results. Here, we will focus on four main types of local search intent:

1. National intent search queries
2. Semi-national search queries
3. Local intent search queries
4. Hyper-local intent search queries

Your SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) results will be reflected in the type of search queries you pose:

National intent search queries will not feature a state or city-specific result in the SERPs, as well as no maps will appear for reference. If you don’t see any local results here, Google has likely determined that there is no local intent to show. If the searcher types in items with more specificity, local intent will show up in a more predictable manner.

Semi-national intent search queries will also not feature a state or city-specific result, but maps will show in this type of query. Because there are an equal number of hits for local and national inquiries, such as [gym], maps may be included. This might be that while some people are searching for a nearby gym, others are looking for the gym’s homepage.

Local intent search queries SERPs will feature state or city-specific results with maps. Google will display maps of local mechanics for a phrase like [mechanic], while the rest of the results on page one are location pages. Google assumes that the user wants to locate a mechanic nearby.

Hyper-local intent search queries put the emphasis on the location as important to the searcher, and this highly influences the SERPs results. The user and company distance is the most important factor here. In these cases, the maps take up the majority of the SERP space. So, Google likely believes that [Restaurants near me] need hyper-local results to be beneficial for the user.

Identifying Search Intent

1. Evaluate current SERP results across various geographies
2. Search for a map element in the SERP
3. Look for pages particular to your state or city
4. Examine the URLs and titles
5. Determine purpose based on consistency analysis

Search Intent Strategies

National

Strategies with a national emphasis will require substance and authority. If you’ve identified that your target keywords are in searches with little to no local intent, your main website should be where you put the majority of your SEO budget. Creating backlinks will assist you in obtaining that ranking.

Semi-national

With one extra point of concentration, semi-local keywords will need the majority of your attention while you construct the content and authority of your primary site. You must improve your Google Business Profile listings since semi-local keywords produce maps.

Local Strategy

After you’ve shown that Google views your keyword as local, your site layout will become substantially more crucial. You may boost the number of searches by creating a directory of state or city sites.

Hyper-local Strategy

It is best to build a directory of state and city-level sites and optimize them for near-me keywords with unique location pages when your priority keywords are hyper-local.

Depending on your vertical, the layers will probably appear differently, but they may resemble this:

1. Locator index page
2. State page
3. City page
4. Location page

• Location Data

This is no longer an issue thanks to local listings management firms. Unfortunately, we continue to see companies with several locations that lack a “single source of truth” for all of their location-related data. Put this in place if it isn’t already.

• Store Locators

It is common for companies to outsource and manage their shop locators. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this. However, there are a few ways that this can go wrong that we have observed:

Store Locators are Search Only

An efficient shop locator for SEO should be a straightforward connected collection of state, city, and location sites that a bot or user can browse around to get all of. Nevertheless, a search box is frequently included on shop locator pages for many companies, making it easy to discover your location.

We highly recommend that you use the following structure for full optimization: linkable
“state > city > location” architecture. By using this method, your results are sure to make an impact.

Location Page Content

Brands frequently allocate money to creating a location on their website but leave little for the content.

A straightforward location page with the company name, address, contact information, and categories of goods and services is quite acceptable. Yet, a location page with distinctive content that has been enhanced and is pertinent to the area and the subjects you are seeking to rank for might enhance SEO performance.

Your location managers will be helpful in this situation. Successful companies frequently employ location managers’ surveys to gather original local information. Additional sources can include consumer evaluations from the area, syndicated local point-of-interest data, and top sellers in the niche.

Categories

Nowadays, the majority of e-commerce inquiries place local results close to the top of the SERPs. Brands that succeed in Local Packs frequently connect from their location pages to their important categories. Consider it as telling Google that the locations you’ve chosen are appropriate for these categories.

• Your Google Business Profile

Although a Google Business Profile (GBP) is simply a set of yellow pages listings for your locations, there is a myriad of ways for businesses to make it go wrong. Read on to see the challenges and the optimization opportunities.

Duplicate Listings

It’s amazing that GBP still allows duplicate listings, but if you are having issues ranking, having multiple GBP listings could be culprit. You will see dramatically increased results just by deleting duplicate listings. Thus, pay attention to those.

GBP Listings

If Google believes data from a third party to be more reliable than your own, it may replace your information. GBP is not something you can set and forget. Create a method to frequently check for updates to your GBP pages.The GBP Dashboard will show you most changes, but not all. Use a tool that will compensate for the changes the Dashboard misses.

GBP Posts

You can add brief announcements known as GBP Posts to your profile. This is a cost-effective strategy to attract visitors who would convert well to your website. Posts may contain text, images, or video.

Businesses are frequently not set up to develop content for each region, which is a difficulty we frequently see. Implement a method for producing GBP-ready marketing materials for fresh promotions if you wish to conduct GBP Posts for many locations.

As part of any new promotion, this frequently entails developing a GBP-sized version (400 x 300) of authorized marketing graphics and content. To track performance, you should also make sure to tag links from your GBP articles with tracking parameters.

• Local Search Presence

Not all local business brands have physical locations.

Several service area companies (SABs) like painters and mechanics as well as local marketplace brands like Bing, Skip the Dishes, and Realtor.ca target local search inquiries yet are not permitted to show in Local Packs. This is as a result of the absence of any physical presence in their target markets. And by doing so, they are losing out on a lot of possible clicks and earnings.

The creation of a “shop inside a store” at the site of a partner brand is a terrific strategy to increase local pack visibility, but it won’t work for every company. Of course, if the leads’ worth is high enough, you could want to think about setting up real sites in specific places in an effort to score well in the Local Packs.

In conclusion, there are various tactics that brands can use to boost their local SEO. As you try new strategies, make sure to test, measure, and iterate as you implement, just like you would with any other marketing channel.

Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/enterprise-local-seo-challenges/413212/