Are you planning to launch your business into the online world? If so, you cannot afford to ignore your local competition. To beat the competition, you need to connect with your audience, before you can sell your services/products. So how do you do that? Take help from Local SEO marketing!

In fact, Local SEO marketing is the latest development in the arena of Digital Marketing. Today, small or mid-level companies with limited budget, use this marketing technique for advertising their business to local markets.

What is local SEO?

Often, local businesses feel outdone by the big nationals and multinationals with unlimited fund and work force, but SEO is a great opportunity for local business if done properly. Every 4 out of 5 businesses today are looking for local optimization.

Local SEO- The Process

• Use the city, state/province name in the Title Tag

Mention the city and state/province name in the title tag. This is important because the title tag is crucial for local SEO optimization and including the city and state name is an important signal that you intend to do serious business.

• Use the city, state/province name in Headings (H1)

Include the city and state/province name in the H1 heading to optimize the content for local search SEO. The heading may not be the heading text itself, but you should use the city and state name in the heading part of the page to confirm your intention of local business SEO.

However, you must remember that it is not enough to mention the same in the content. You must actually address the local market in the content. It will be useless and futile if you are optimizing the content for the local market but fail to mention the place.

• Use the city and state/province name in Text & Images

Placing text on images gives something to Google for knowing your business because it cannot see the images, and see only what is there on the images. Here too, do not forget to mention locally relevant information.

Finally, do not forget to use the URL without the city and state name if you are capable of editing the URL structure. Doing this will send strong signal to Google and your prospective customers about your business. In case you want the old address to point to the new one permanently, it is important that you update your URLs to establish 301 redirects.

The more important thing is to make your site great, relevant, and appealing in your niche than to think about ranking it high. If your site performs and is the best in your niche, it will have more visitors automatically and rank high.

How to get categorized as authentic local business?

Therefore, to qualify as a genuinely local enterprise, you should remember a few points.

1. Your business should be local specifically. It is important to know that being in a specific domain does not make your business local, but acting at a local level does.
2. Your business should have a local address and phone number for creating real and strong impact locally. It must also have the same information, whether online or offline.
3. You also need to use keywords on social media for boosting ranking but there should be regular content posting, otherwise, it would be as good as no presence on social media or can backfire.
4. Use effective content with appropriate keywords in the right density only and not stuff the contents and blogs with the keywords.

These points will go a long way in making your business click locally.