Local directories are much like the phone books of old. These directories store your business name, address, and phone number and are used by a variety of sources to find businesses based on local search criteria.
According to HubSpot, there are four primary directories to check to make sure your business is listed and shows the exact same information across all of the directories. Look for typos to fix and abbreviations to spell out entirely. Search and verify your business information here:
Aside from directories, other reference sources are important as well.
Verify that your business name, address, and phone number are in plain text on your website and blog pages. Businesses often use images to display this information which makes it nearly impossible for Google to index with a local reference.
Likely one of the best strategies you can implement is to share audiences. One way to do this is to guest-blog with another business. This type of cross-promotion exposes both businesses to wider and new audiences. Guest-blogging creates inbound links to your website, further highlighting your website as a trusted source of information as Google sees it. For the extra push, consider guest blogging about your industry with local education organizations. Inbound links ending in .edu rank with the highest authority level and will push your business closer to the top ranking.
Six Bonus SEO Tools
Consider using a few online tools to further optimize and index your content. Recommendations include:
- Whitespark Local Citation Finder - The Local Citation Finder helps you quickly find key citations your competitors have that you need and improve your local ranking factors.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider - SEO Spider is a powerful and flexible site crawler, able to crawl both small and very large websites efficiently, while allowing you to analyse the results in real-time. It gathers key onsite data to allow SEOs to make informed decisions.
- Moz Local - You'll only need to fill out your approved data once per business location. The rest of the process is automated.
- Ahrefs - See the exact keywords for which your competitors rank in organic search and the amount of traffic driven by each of them. Ahrefs runs the world’s largest index of live backlinks. Their robots constantly crawl 54 billion web pages, and every 15 minutes they update their index with fresh data. Put your website into Site Explorer to see all its backlinks and useful SEO metrics.
- Buzzstream - Spend less time on spreadsheets and more time building links. BuzzStream researches prospects, monitors links, and helps you do great outreach.
- BrightLocal - The complete toolkit to track and improve local SEO performance. All your local SEO data in one place. All the tools you need to get better results.
Next, in Part 5 of the series: Getting Regular Customer Reviews
Now it’s time to get the coveted reviews about your business from your customers. Reviews go a long way when prospects are considering doing business with your company. Past customer experiences speak volumes.
SEO Your Way to Profit
Now is the time to plan, act, and execute on your Local SEO strategy. With the current business climate, this is a great time to get to implement and refine the steps necessary to launch your SEO marketing strategy and impact your sales for 2020 when things get back to near normal.
Get started today we’re here to help.
