Local SEO: tips and mistakes to avoid

Local SEO is the set of activities that revolve around search engine optimization of one’s local business. If, in fact, SEO is about search engine optimization of a website, Local SEO is its namesake that operates, however, in a purely local key.

The purpose of Local SEO is to provide relevant search results as a result of a given local search (local search) and geographic location.

If you have a small to medium-sized local business, it is essential to take a specific strategic digital marketing approach by leveraging the right tools to compete and increase your brand’s visibility by optimizing your SERP ranking. In this way, your site will be viewed by those who are actually looking for your products and services in the areas surrounding your business, and the likelihood of user conversion will be higher.

But what are the steps for proper implementation of Local SEO to create an effective Local Marketing strategy?

Table of Contents:
How to do Local SEO?
1. Optimize usability from mobile
2. Do keyword research
3. Optimize the Meta Tag Title and Meta Description.
4. Make the most of Google My Business
5. Analyze the results
Black Hat SEO tactics: why a local business should avoid them
The negative consequences on your local business
The 8 tactics to avoid
Conclusion
How to do Local SEO?
Here are the main points you need to keep in mind to optimize your site and content and implement a Local SEO strategy to expand your business locally.

1. Optimize usability from mobile
Nowadays it is important that your site is responsive, that is, that it can adapt to the size of every device you use (desktop, tablet, smartphone), with special attention to usability from mobile, the preferred navigation tool for users. When thinking about the layout and format to give your site, remember that it must be user-friendly.

Why? Many of the searches made from mobile have a high probability of purchase and therefore conversion: usually, the user is out and about and looking for the product/service at that very moment. Getting found online will make a difference.

In your Local SEO strategy pay attention to keyword research: while long-tail keywords are strategic from desktop, from mobile the user is looking for speed and immediacy so opt for short and essential keywords that get straight to the point.

2. Do keyword research
It is essential to be aware of what people are searching for in order to intercept opportunities and understand current trends.

Identifying the keywords that have the highest search volume and search intent, therefore, is an essential activity to get you found and noticed by users.

If your Web site is not relevant to the identified search terms, you will not only have difficulty ranking your Web site but also risk a high bounce rate.

People tend to search for businesses near them, so it is important to take advantage of the geographic location of your business. The advice is to include, in your meta tags, the cities closest to you.

3. Optimize the Meta Tag Title and Meta Description.
The title meta tag and meta description are two of the key elements from an SEO perspective for your site’s ranking in the SERP (the search results page) and for CTR (click-through-rate, the link open rate).

What are the tips to best optimize them in a Local SEO strategy?

• Include in both the title and description meta tags your brand name to make yourself identifiable.
• Include your target city or area so you provide clear geographic cues.
• Include your most relevant keywords for better SERP ranking.

4. Make the most of Google My Business.
To get the most out of your local business, it is vital to optimize your Google My Business profile to channel users interested in your products/services to your site and convert them.

What are some tips for optimizing your Google My Business account?

Choose the right categories based on those suggested by Google

Write a comprehensive description of the company, including keywords and strategic links.

Carefully choose the profile image and the various photos to upload: high definition and that they are in line with the published text.

Add your business phone number to be immediately reachable by users who want to contact you.

Enter your business address to let users know your location: most useful for a local business.

Add opening and closing hours to provide adequate customer care service.

5. Analyze the results
It may be trite to say, but it represents an essential phase of your marketing activity: analyzing the results allows you to understand if you are going in the right direction or if you need to modify some aspect of your strategy.

The choice of keywords, the meta description, the various content on your site: the analysis activity allows you to decide your next move, modifying the various components and optimizing your resources in the best possible way.

Black Hat SEO tactics: why a local business should avoid them
SEO is a complex discipline in which you need to invest time and resources. For a local business, it can be a challenging investment, especially since the results show up over the long term. For this reason, some resort to shortcuts and tactics known as Black Hat SEO. While they may yield results in the short term, they will be counterproductive in the long run and will be penalized by Google’s algorithm.

Black Hat SEO includes all those incorrect tactics implemented to improve your site’s search engine rankings. Precisely because SEO optimization takes time and resources, shortcuts are sought to speed up results by tricking search engines. How? Instead of working from a user perspective, the focus is on how the algorithm itself operates.

The negative consequences on your local business
The goal of search engines is to provide the user with results that are useful and in line with the relevant search queries: constant algorithm updates are proof of this, for example, Google BERT increasingly focusing on user language.

While in the short term Black Hat tactics can provide you with ranking benefits, as the algorithm is updated the situation is reversed and, if you have used any Black Hat tactics on your site, you will be penalized in the SERP, with greater harm than the initial benefit.

How so? Google has always suggested to webmasters or website owners how to move to improve ranking in the SERP. There are no shortcuts, you have to create a great user experience:

• Produce valuable content that is relevant to the audience.
• Optimize site usability from mobile.
• Control the loading speed of the site.

The 8 tactics to avoid
Here are the 8 Black Hat tactics we advise against using.

1. Keyword stuffing

Researching which keywords to use is one of the essential elements of a winning SEO strategy: the words used are directly related to the terms for which a page on your website will be ranked, defining its topic clearly to search engines.

The practice of keyword stuffing consists of excessive repetition in a text of the keyword to be optimized.

Initially, frequent use of a keyword within the page favored your ranking on search results because the algorithm associated it with the topic considering your content relevant.

Later, increasingly sophisticated algorithms began to recognize this practice as unfair, giving less importance to the frequency with which the keyword was placed on the page and penalizing sites guilty of keyword stuffing.

This practice is one of the most widely used black hat tactics despite the increasingly humane direction of the latest algorithm updates-think, for example, of BERT, which aims to improve user understanding of natural language. Try not to overload your page with the same keyword: you risk creating content that does not make logical sense to your visitors.

2. Pay for backlinks

Backlinks are a very powerful and, at the same time, very challenging SEO tool: it means being able to get links from other websites that link back to yours, precisely because your site is considered valuable.

The practice of link building becomes unfair when in order to get a backlink you have to pay the company that sells links at cheap prices. Why? Very often the links come from spam sites set up specifically for this practice.

As with keywords, with the algorithm update, nowadays Google is concerned about checking the authority of the sites on which your backlinks are hosted, prioritizing quality over quantity. This is why low-quality links hurt your website: focus your strategy on legitimate link building.

3. Hiding parts of text

It is a practice also called cloaking, now little used, to insert the various keywords on the page making them visible to search engines but not to the human eye, either by hiding them in the page code or by unifying the color so they blend in with the background.

In either case, it is counterproductive because your page will rank for keywords that do not relate to the actual topic being covered, leaving your visitors dissatisfied and exiting the navigation, penalizing you.

4. Paying unprofessional content creators

Creating quality content is a key element in your SEO strategy that requires time and resources.

Rely on unprofessional content creators who promise you content for a low price. The work will be poorly executed, poorly flowing, and with excessive keyword usage-you will waste time editing and reorganizing all your content.

Writing is a time-consuming, resource-intensive and careful activity: it is what connects you to your visitors.

5. Duplicate content

Creating new and updated content is a challenging activity. For this very reason, some small businesses duplicate their content, slightly changing the text by focusing on a new keyword to repurpose it for a different page. This black hat tactic is penalized by Google, which prefers content that is always original with new information.

6. Linking pages

Link pages are those pages that do not contain actual content but simply a list of links more or less related to the original search. The goal of gateway pages is to gain positions with popular keywords, to channel traffic to other sites and pages.

These pages do not provide the user with an optimal browsing experience, which is precisely why they are also penalized by search engines.

7. Bait and switch

Is your content interesting and ranking well in search engines? Perfect.

Don’t make the mistake of changing the content on your page by replacing it with your products/services to try to generate more conversions from users visiting your site. This black hat practice is commonly known as Bait and Switch and you will lose your ranking as soon as the algorithm notices.

8. Spam comments

To date, many blogs have disabled comments under their articles or set rel nofollow: in this way, comments, especially those that contain spam links, will have no relevance for SEO purposes and will not risk penalizing the site.

Therefore, avoid leaving spam comments because in addition to being penalizing from an SEO perspective, it is very often useless given the precautionary measures taken by various sites.

Conclusion
For a winning Local SEO strategy, optimize your site from mobile and take advantage of the potential of Google My Business to make it easier for users who are nearby to find you.

Analyze the local context and your competitors to stand out and offer products and services that will attract users.

Invest your time and resources on the communication plan created with SEO in mind, without resorting to Black Hat practices, and implement your web project with a quality Hosting.