What is local SEO marketing?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. What that means is you’re optimizing your website, your social media or whatever platform you’re using for certain keywords or phrases that you expect people to use to find your business. There’s really no specific location. Local SEO marketing is basically targeting a specific location in the world.
So for instance, you’re a brick and mortar business in Los Angeles, California. Los Angeles is pretty big. Let’s go a little bit deeper. We’ll say you’re a business in Torrance, California since I’m in Torrance, California. So if I want to just target all Torrance, that is local SEO because I just want to target that specific city. Whereas SEO targets broader, you’ll be targeting broader keywords so you’d be nationwide or even worldwide. An example is if you’re a local dentist in Huntington beach, California. Something that someone might type in is “dentist in Huntington Beach” and you want to start ranking for that. So then you would optimize your website or your social media or whatever online platform out there for that keyword. That’s basically local SEO marketing. It is ranking for specific location, whereas SEO is ranking for broader terms or something bigger.
So how do you look at SEO marketing? One way to do local SEO marketing is having your own website especially if you’re a brick and mortar business or a business in general. You want to have your website because this is one thing you control a hundred percent. You can control the content, images and everything that you put on there. Whereas if you just have social media like Google My Business, Facebook or Instagram, you still are set to their guidelines and their rules. Not that you will break their rules, but you’re still confined to what you can do on their platform. And if they want to take down your business or your page just because, they could do it because it is their platform.
For your website, we’ll go back to the dentist in Huntington Beach. Start making content to the local area. Like talking about how you’ve been working in Huntington Beach or how your business has been in Huntington Beach, for how long, specifically Huntington Beach. Kind of put it in your content and make it flow with your website. So not only on the front end but in the backend, in the meta-tags and meta description, and that’s going a little bit deeper. But that’s one of the ways you could start ranking locally on your website – it’s using that, finding those keywords that people search for and adding your city in it.
Another good way is, I mentioned this in another video – Google My Business because it puts you on Google Maps. So, if the local dentist created his business page, all he needs to do is put his address in that says he’s in Huntington Beach. That way, he’ll show up on Google Maps for if someone locally is searching for his business and depending on the radius from him and that person, their business will show up on Google Maps even if you’re far away from them. Sometimes if you have a lot of good reviews, your profile’s filled out correctly, you will still show up for that person.
Another way to start doing local SEO marketing is what we call citations. They have different services that offer this for you. But the citations are like the Yellow Pages or White Pages or Mantra. Yelp could also be considered a citation. But these are basically directories. What you want to do is go look up citations on Google or start filling out, go to Yellow Pages directly, White Pages, Mantra or a home advisor or stuff like that and just fill out the profiles on each one of them. Or what you can do is, I’ll link in the description what services that we use to build the citations for you so you could do it automatically. They have different packages where they could do a hundred for you or they could do 500 for you. But this basically fills it all. You put one information down your business, everything and then it’ll basically create each separate profile for you on the different citations. And I’ll post a link in the bio and or in the description box so you could use that service because all you really need to use it is once. I don’t recommend the services that pay for a monthly. I don’t think it’s worth it. Unless you’re constantly changing your location or making updates. I don’t think it’s worth it to just pay them on the thing. You could just probably do it once and then say, if you do move locations, go on there again and just update it. Have them update it for you.
So, yeah, that’s some tips to how to do local SEO marketing. And if you guys have any questions about SEO or marketing locally, please let me know. Feel free to leave your question in the comment box, email us or go on Instagram or Facebook.