Can anybody show me the best ways of running local SEO for small business websites?

If you’re looking for the best approaches to SEO for small business operating at the level of locales (i.e., within a given city/town or particular target area), I’m here to help you with that. The thing is that the general concept of the Search Engine Optimization (otherwise, organic SEO handled nationwide/globally) has a lot of very similar (if not completely matching) things with the narrower concept of Local Search Optimization. At the same time, however, apart from the commonest working stuff related to both of them which often seems fully comparable, there are some principal differences and specific peculiarities. 

Taken in general, there are just two core specific components that make a core difference between so-called “regular” SEO and Local SEO – the way of targeting potential customers at the local level, as well as the major ranking factor seen as a precisely targeted local search itself (i.e., user’s geography or “proximity”). Keeping all that in mind, below I will show you a couple of arguably the best approaches to local SEO recommended for every small business website. Ultimately, when handled and implemented correctly, the following simple suggestions and actionable steps can help you win more local clients/buyers within your target city/town or geographical area. That being said, let’s quickly run through them all. 

Best Local SEO Tips for Small Business Websites

Before anything else, make sure to clearly outline your location-driven optimization strategy. I mean that every multi-practitioner endeavor (for example, legal or medical company) will be naturally driven by some definitely more sophisticated schemes of local optimization, rather than any other single-location project, home-based business, or brick-and-mortar company. Given that you will most likely start with not too overwhelming one, here are the initial suggestions and basic recommendations needed for optimizing your locally-targeted business website:

• First and foremost, create a welcoming homepage, the primary service/category pages, as well as “contact” & “about” web pages. 
• Next, I’m going to be captain obvious and recommend you to make a double-check that all NAP data listed on each landing page is fully consistent for each location, and includes only correct and complete business name, physical address, and phone number of your company. 
• Once you got everything in place with your NAP data consistency, it’s time to complete your Google My Business page and finally verify your small business website with Google itself. That way, you can also help the major search engines scan and understand all your localized web pages – use Schema markup to have every shred of your website’s data structured the right way for better indexing.

• For multi-regional businesses serving up to 10 different locations, I recommend having all the NAP data additionally listed in the website’s footer. 
• Don’t forget to provide interactive phone numbers that are clickable with mobile devices using a link created with a specific HTML Tag. That way, embed your “contact” page with a Google Map to help your potential visitors find you quickly and at ease, in line with leaving a room for your further localization.