How can I dominate local search SEO with Google?
Remember those good old days, when getting nearly every local business to the top of Google’s local Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) used to be a piece of cake? Yes, seriously, we could climb up without those increasingly sophisticated and complex strategies we are currently forced to deal with. Most of every online business owners could dominate their local search positions in Google’s list of results only following a couple of quick and easy steps. All they needed to stay on top of local search SEO was an unbelievably easy process. Once you had a well-built website structure, got your pages listed in Google’s directory, as well as in a couple of other citation listings - the final step to fulfill your perfect local search SEO campaign was claiming your page known as Google My Business. That way, everyone could burst with a higher ranking on any individual requests responding to Google local results for local keyword query, for example, something like “paving contractor in Texas.”
Today it’s still quite disappointing to me that such a broad and easy-going local search SEO is no longer a common practice. Let’s face it - now we are dealing with a certainly more challenging and ever-changing local search environment. So what can we do? Nothing but try to adapt to this new reality, that needs now every aspect of the Search Engine Optimization, besides the already mentioned sphere of local search SEO. So, let’s try adapting to the new game rules and do our best to win the race. First of all, I suggest looking through which conditions have been adjusted most and need our precise attention before anything else.
Extra tight local competition
No need to say how rapidly it’s moving towards a real battle over every local market. And the current situation shouldn’t be surprising anyway, as the lion’s share of online entrepreneurs are realizing the importance of local search SEO to complete the very basics and move forward to a country-scale operating, or even international cross-border success.
Google My Business does matter, as always
Keeping its original potency, Google My Business has been recently given even stronger emphasis. Original listings of the search giant not only gained more ranking weight, but are now in tight cooperation with the rest of the listings and citations which became more comprehensive and informative. Now they want you to work more persistently to be carefully monitoring every shred of your listed data, which should be as unified as possible, as well as purely matching with each other.
Don’t forget to have more online reviews
Modern local search SEO is delegating an increasingly high importance to the quality set of online reviews. Not only because your good online reviews are showing a very active prospect to drive your website on top of the local search SEO rankings, but because just one cold number - positive reviews are estimated to deliver up to 22% boost to CTR. After all, online reviews are still a powerful tool to engage more new potential clients for your business, and can still serve well for developing your current followers at a time. That’s why quality online reviews are now even more unique, so you should never have them neglected.
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