Do you have any quick & killing local SEO guidelines that will help me get started?

The short answer is yes, I’ve got some basic local SEO guidelines that will give you a solid ground to that point. But3 before we start, let me highlight that actually there isn’t such thing as the ultimate all-round instruction, or universal local SEO guidelines that can instantly bring you a 100% guaranteed progress towards gaining better online visibility in regionally-targeted Google’s search. Why? Simply because there are too many individual specifics for each business case, as well as constantly heating competitive environment. Put simply, just try to complete everything outlined in these basic local SEO guidelines – of course, most of optimization techniques must work perfectly, but anyway you will have to test at least the very basics – to see what actually works well, and which actions should be probably revised or additionally reworked. Hope you’ve got it – and below we’re finally going to get down to the point.

Basic Local SEO Guidelines for Beginners: Before Getting Started

Before anything else, let’s have a deep delve and understand what actually drives the world of local Search Engine Optimization/ Ultimately, to get a big picture of all major factors Google’s taking into account to determine every site’s search ranking positions in local SERPs. So, here are the primary elements of your website’s online performance I’m going to emphasize in our basic local SEO guidelines for starters:

• Business Signals – are mainly referred to your business title (i.e., whether it’s made up, or at least partially includes directly relevant search terms typed by the user), and your actual proximity to the current user’s search location.
• External Signals – include all general business information you’re providing with consistent NAP data. Based on this short & precise information found submitted to data providers (such as local listings and business directories), Google’s search crawling bots collect the necessary data about your business category and location served – to be ready and provide only maximum accurate SERPs relevant to the user’s local search query.
• On-Page Signals – this category of local ranking factors is mainly related to the core target keywords and hyper-local search terms you have included in your page titles, in line with your domain authority taken into account too.
• Link Signals – cover thing like inbound link anchor text (ideally, it should be rich with directly relevant keywords), as well as the link count, quality, and domain authority of their third-party donors.
• Review Signals – note, that user reviews are arguably among the most powerful local ranking signals taken into account not only by the search engines, but the live users, who consider making an instant order with you, or at least are about visiting a brick-and-mortar location of your business before taking the final decision to buy or order with you.
• Behavioral/Personalization Signals – it means that Google’s local search listing is now always made up with the users recent browsing history, current location, and general browsing habits in mind. In other words, the world’s search giant is doing best to provide maximum fitting and individually tailored local search results to every user. This also refers to your average Click-Through rate potential, as well as mobile “click-to-call”, and some other behavioral factors based on user’s common interaction and personalization settings.

Real-Life Local SEO Guidelines: Practical Actions to Be Taken

Once you know where you stand with your local business website, it’s time to start the actual process of targeted optimization for Google’s SERPs. When it comes to generating a sufficient flow of organic search traffic, you should proceed with body content and landing page optimization before anything else. Here are the main things to keep in mind and the standard practical actions, which should be taken to that point.

NAP Data Consistency

Create a proper NAP data, make sure it’s fully consistent before setting it on your landing page. Next, maintain NAP consistency throughout your Google My Business dashboard, all social media profiles and local listings/business citations, where you’re submitting the primary information about your business. The thing is that NAP data must be exactly matching so that Google has no discrepancies when crawling it through different places on the Internet.

Website Structure

Given that you’re offering several different services or serving multiple locations with your local business, creating specific pages for each item/place is a MUST. Ideally, you should make up each web page with your own hands to get them genuinely unique (i.e., without using a templated version of the same single web page, or cloning them by way of only changing the name of the city/town or region). Consider providing much helpful information and a lot of useful supportive data with your homepage, in line with dropping some internal links pointing to the other relevant subpages or related subsections/category pages of your website for better user experience and short-cut access without making even single spare click. Doing so, you will not only improve the average time per user visit and elevate Click-Through rate, but provide a clear, logical structure of your website, which potentially contributes better crawling and indexing with Google’s robots, and therefore is setting a reasonable ground for your further ranking promotion over time.

Local On-Page Optimization Plan

When creating content, consider the following suggestions to the Search Engine Optimization at the on-page level. 

Take a moment to make sure that:

• You don’t have any duplicate content, because even partially matching body page content can put you at risk of earning Google’s ranking penalty.
• There are always unique and sufficiently well-optimized Title Tags, H1/H2/H3 Headers, Meta Descriptions, Image ALT Tags, and Link Anchors. To make things easier, I recommend using a plugin like Yoast that can help you edit the main on-page elements – staying directly on your website.
• Your homepage, landings, as well as the primary category/service pages, are all embedded with Google’s Map – not only for better user experience, but for prioritizing yourself in local search at some point.
• Page loading speed is sufficiently fast, because this indispensable part of user experience has already become a relatively strong ranking factor for Google itself. Moreover, from the viewpoint of local search and its dominant browsing mode via portable devices, providing fast page loading speed appears even more important than ever. To test yourself, I recommend using Google’s default speed checker online tool – and you’re done.