One of ecommerce’s key benefits is the ability it affords you to market and sell your goods all over the world.
And yet,your best opportunities might be found marketing on a local level. After all, just because you can market all over the world doesn’t mean you should.
So, what are you waiting for, here’s how to leverage local SEO to enhance your appeal to a specific marketplace.
Let us have a closer look.
Local Appeal
With the rise of mobile computing have come location-based searches. As an example, when Google notes a search is coming from a mobile device, it narrow the results to the location of the user in an effort to provide the most relevant information. To ensure your inclusion in these results, incorporate a location reference into the title of your site and page titles. Run your business name, address and phone number on each page of your site. Set up a Google+ page and optimize it. Encourage customers to leave reviews on Google+, Yelp and all other relevant local review sites. These actions will cover the most potent local search ranking factors.
Build Local Links
Joining your local Chamber of Commerce and being listed on its membership page will get you a well-respected local link right off the bat. Joining the Better Business Bureau will do the same—as well as stamping your business with the endorsement of a highly trusted organization. Find a relevant scholarship fund at a college in your area and become a donor. Colleges have the highly vaunted .edu suffix, from which inbound links are considered very authoritative. However, make it a point to avoid link exchange schemes—Google frowns upon the practice.
Guest Posts
A highly effective back-linking strategy, guest posting can raise your profile considerably in local circles. Just be careful to choose high-quality sites—otherwise your rankings could actually suffer. You’re looking for blogs with strong domain authority, and “dofollow” outbound links. Look at their recently published posts to see if they’ve been shared on multiple platforms. If so, you’re probably looking at a quality site with good engagement and a living community around it.
Your Local SEO Strategy
Let’s say you’re selling ebooks online and you have a trove of regionally specific titles to promote. Your first step should be to publish content relevant to the regions covered by your books. You want to become known as an expert (or at least a trusted authority) in those areas. To accomplish this, yourposts must be on topic, accurate and compelling. You can also use your site to promote local events with relevance to your books. Run excerpts from the books capable of standing alone as blog posts and make every effort to ensure you don’t have duplicate listings in the area. This too can count against you in the rankings.
Local SEO Tools
The USPS Look Up a ZIP Code feature can show you every ZIP code in a given city—and vice versa. This can help you determine where to focus your content, link building, brand building, real-world relationship building, social media marketing, and PPC efforts.
The Google Search Console helps you with analytics and alerts you to errors and other factors capable of derailing your local SEO efforts. Organic search is a key component of any SEO strategy. This tool will help you make sure yours is tight.
These are but two of a plethora of high-quality free SEO tools out there.
When considering how to leverage local SEO, concentrate your efforts upon claiming your Google profile, building local citations and perfectingyour on-site optimization. You also want to make sure you’re getting good local online reviews and taking advantage of the best local SEO tools.
