Can you explain me how to get started with local SEO and which search ranking factors should be focused?

Yes, I can help you understand the very basics of local SEO, and which search ranking factors should be given the strongest priority over there. Ultimately, for you to be well-informed when finally getting down to optimizing your own business website operating at the level of locales. That being said, let’s start with seven primary areas that will need your most precise attention before anything else. 

Introduction to Local SEO: Top Search Ranking Factors to Focus

• Business – this category of local ranking signals cares mainly about your brick-and-mortar business location, and its proximity to the user’s actual position, who is running search nearby. Next element of top importance is your business title and its keyword targeting for the relevant search term.
• External Location – these factors include Internet Yellow Pages, as well as your business NAP data consistency. All related information coming from Internet data providers and citations of your business will be scanned by the search crawling bots and used to determine your rankings in Google’s local SERPs.
• On-Page SEO – includes the core keywords and localized search terms found in your Titles, as well as your Domain Authority.
• Links – basically, the search engines are looking for inbound link anchor text, which should be rich with your core keywords. As for external local links, they will be taken into consideration depending on their Domain Authority and total backlink count.
• Reviews – note that this category is among arguably the most important signals in local SEO. User reviews are not only the votes of your business trust and credibility, but will strongly impact your search ranking potential in their own way.
• Behaviour – covers mainly your average Click-Through Rate, as well as user’s mobile Clicks-To-Call.
• Personalization – refers to your website’s specific setup, that should be maximum tailored to the search intent and browsing habits of the target local audience (for example, the recent search or navigation history). Yes, this category seems a bit sophisticated, indeed.

Reality of Local SEO: Search Optimization Tips & Tricks

So, once you get everything in place with the primary ranking factors considered by Google’s local SEO, it’s time to set the right priorities and act. Here are some simple ideas and practical hints to help you with that. Consider the following suggestions (in order of the most significant to the least important):

• Claim or update the existing information listed on your Google My Business page.
• Create a consistent NAP data and locate it on your landing pages.
• If you’re serving multiple locations or product/services, make sure to create unique landings for each region and availability category you have with it.

• Revamp your URLs and make each of them customized to describe the actual physical location using hyper-local keywords (i.e., those made up with the name of the city/town or region you’re serving).
• When creating content, you should aim to produce separate pieces of content for each location, so that each of your target locations benefits in its own way.
• Run a double-check to quickly spot any shreds of duplicate content. Once again, you landings and specific service pages must be all unique and contain high-quality text writings. Otherwise, you will quickly earn yourself Google’s ranking penalty.
• Optimize your Meta Titles and Descriptions for a target locale, in line with using plugins like Yoast to have short-cut access to editing.
• Embed your homepage and main category pages with Google’s Map.
• Don’t forget to create a specific page for customer reviews. That should also include customer testimonials and comments to build strong confidence and trust among your target audience.
• Don’t forget to provide a sufficiently fast page loading speed, backed with responsive web design – and you’re done.