Do More With Less: 30 Minutes of Local SEO Every Week

Given the current economic climate, sales teams are giving strength and are expected to do more with less.

If you are a business owner focused on generating income from local areas, then you know that fierce competition is waiting for you to reduce your local marketing efforts.

In such cases, it is important to maintain the right content structure that will allow you to stand out in the home search results.

Here is a list of 5 things to focus on if you only have 30 minutes a week or less to dedicate to your local marketing efforts.

1. Optimize Your Google Business Profile Listing And Social Profiles

A complete and reliable listing of Google Business Listings is one of the pillars of local SEO.

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make in local SEO is to simply upload a small amount of data to Google Business Database (GBP) and then put it on autopilot.

A powerful way to promote your business in local SEO listings is to have your full name, address, and postal code (NAP) information, and add photos, categories, hours of operation, and much more.

Once your GBP account is filled, you need to make sure it is verified. Verification can happen by phone, text, email, or video. Here are the instructions you need to make sure it’s confirmed.

Once it’s confirmed, this is where you need to make sure you focus on your listing to answer reviews or questions from customers.

Check back at least monthly (if not more) to upload new photos and check your accounting performance in GBP.

Follow this same process for your top social media profiles.

Home search queries on social media have skyrocketed over the past decade, and you want to make sure you can be as easily found on Google as you can on Facebook and Twitter.

2. Complete A Job, Ask For A Review

Generating five-star reviews is one of the most effective ways to increase your presence in local search engine results pages (SERPs).

By increasing your average value and increasing your value, local SERPs are able to float those results up. Additionally, social proof derived from five-star reviews is an important way to get customers to trust your brand.

Before you go out of your way to generate reviews, you need to be careful about how you ask for reviews from customers.

There are ‘reviewers’ on platforms like Yelp who will discard some reviews or penalize your business listing if they appear to have been solicited illegally by the business owner.

Here are two good ways to generate more reviews (without being filtered):

3. Create Localized Blog Or Website Page Content

Your business needs a level of personal content to rank in local search

Without a local signal on your site, search engines are less likely to link you to a targeted geography.

Here are a few common ways to manage your content:

Product/Services Pages

On your product/service pages, include local edits in your copy and image descriptions so your audience can connect.

One of the biggest mistakes that local businesses make when building their product pages is that they make the copy generic so that the page can be used for business in any city.

On the contrary, you should not fill your website copy with specific terms. Search engines are very good at narrowing down your content when your copy looks like it’s full of local keywords.

The best way to check this is to read your copy out loud to a friend. If it doesn’t seem right to any of you, then you may have gone a little overboard when adding password modifiers.

Galleries

If you offer services to locations in your area, show photos of your work along with a description of the type of product/service you offer and a few local adjustments in the description.

Branch/Franchise Pages

If your business has multiple locations, then each of your locations should have its own page on your site.

On these branch pages, you’ll want to include your NAP, hours of operation, information about where your branch is located, and photos of your location (interior and exterior, if possible). These branch pages should also be linked to each of their own GBP pages.

4. Build Backlinks From Your Network

The good thing about local SEO and link building is that, in most cases, you don’t need to build thousands of links. Instead, in most cases, you just need a lot more than your local competitors to help with SEO.

The easiest way to build backlinks to your site is to generate them from businesses you are affiliated with.

Here are a couple of situations related to the types of partnerships you may run into in your day-to-day business operations:

So as a first step, compile a list of all the business connections you have in your area, and find out why these connections should connect with you.

5. Generate Local Citations

Details are simply the mention of your business name, address, and phone number on the website.

Citations are often found in large local directories (like Google Maps) but can also be found in specific directories like APlaceForMom.com, which is a directory specifically for senior living.

The signs don’t have to contain a link for you to get credit. Google views mentions of your business name as a signal of local authority.

Here are two great ways to increase your citations:

Personally, I like the combination of these two methods because the automatic ranking tool cannot always fill in every field of information or verify the entire profile.

To start, focus your initial efforts on Google, Yelp, Bing, and Facebook.

Then search for 5 to 10 specific directories (the ones that show up regularly in search results for your target audience) and aim to get your business listed there.

Conclusion

Finally, even though you may not have a lot of time to devote to local SEO, that doesn’t mean you can’t generate some impressive results.

You just need to be strategic about how you use that time and where you focus on it.

Devoting 30 minutes a week to the 5 areas we covered above will generate more traffic, leads, and customers for your business in a matter of months.

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