How to make my website optimization strategy tailored to specific SEO for Google local search?

Nowadays, general specifics of nearly all regionally-focused optimization approaches to SEO for Google local SERPs are commonly falling into something around 8-10 major ranking factors. Therefore, you won’t have too much work to do for getting your existing organic SEO strategy revamped to some point – so that it becomes adapted to the most critical elements of SEO determining Google local rankings, and the way the search engines measure your website’s overall online performance at the level of locales. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can simply forget all about the most traditional ranking factors, which are prevalent in the area of nationwide/general SEO. Nevertheless, when it comes to local promotion, your existing approach should be reworked to a certain degree – ultimately, to comply with all necessary requirements to localized SEO and Google local ranking factors ruling over there. So, here is all you need at that point.

Top 8 Ranking Factors that Impact SEO in Google’s Local SERPs

Google My Business (GMB) Dashboard

Before anything else, start with creating/verifying your own business listing in GMB dashboard, or claiming the existing one to verify yourself as a genuine business owner. Given that this area truly deserves a step-by-step instruction on its own, I’m going to outline only the most critical requirements and practical suggestions to help you with that:

• Create a sufficiently informative (otherwise, long) and purely unique business description.
• Make sure to pick the right generic business categories, paying precise attention to the rest of more specific ones to take your best-fitting choice.
• Upload at least 5-6 photos to showcase interior/exterior of your business (consider hiring a professional photographer – that will definitely payoff).
• Run a double-check to have only correct and fully consistent basic NAP data (i.e., name, physical address, phone number, opening hours, featured payment methods, etc.).

Google Reviews

Keep in mind that the number and quality of your business reviews have a direct impact on your local ranking potential in organic search listings. I personally recommend taking a moment to quickly run through the main Guidelines for Business Reviews (available on Google’s official user support pages). Just take this in – reviews are actually recognized by the search engines as fully self-sufficient ranking factors – and keep moving on.

Photos

It may sound like a no-brainer, but the importance of high-quality photos and smart way of shooting them DOES matter to localized SEO & Google local rankings of your business website. Once again, let me highlight that hiring a professional photographer will give you another measurable advantage over your local niche competitors, in line with giving you a certain sign of personality in the eyes of every potential client/buyer clicking on you. With all that in mind, make sure to focus on the following core ideas and these simple suggestions to take the pictures best way possible:

• Shoot your business location itself, both internal areas, and locales outside (i.e., parking lot, physical location around your building, some remarkable places and nearby objects that can help you guide every visitor, etc.).
• The more clearly showcasing pictures of sufficiently high quality you get, the better. Consider adding a personal touch, for example, shooting a picture of yourself on the premises that demonstrate you as a proud business owner.
• Don’t forget to emphasize your good mood and positive sentiments prevailing your daily working schedule. Consider taking some pictures of your key staff employees, as well as your happy clients/buyers (of course, that should be done upon their permission).
• After all, you should also upload some bright photos that will showcase the strongest sides of your products or demonstrate the most attractive stuff related to the service served with your business. That’s it.

Links

Considering that Google keeps using a lot of traditional SEO-based ranking signals in its local search algorithm, your internal links and external links (otherwise, backlinks) will matter a lot as well. Most commonly, Google Reviews and your GMB profile are the most important places that are pulling together nearly all primary link-related factors that impact your SEO positioning in Google's local search results.

Link Quality & Domain Count

Next comes the actual number of local domains linking to your website. Given that there is nothing special about your linking domain count, just make sure to run a competitive research to inspect link profiles of the leading local niche websites owned by your most successful competitors. That way, take a moment to delve deep into prospecting link opportunities. More specifically, look for local websites and blogs with the highest PageRank/Domain Authority scores which link to your rival’s pages, but aren’t linking to your own business website. Focus more on those third parties, which have links pointing to several websites of your opponents – and you’ll have much better chances of getting linked too.

Anchors

Basically, your main goal is to have the maximum number of hyper-local text anchors for each inbound link found in your website’s profile (of course, when applicable). That way, consider putting over there the name of the city/town or region served with your business, combined with your core keywords so that you will create a lot of potentially winning long-tail keyword expressions with a precise local targeting. Again, you might as well apply for competitive research and benefit from using the best findings and solid ideas already employed by your closest market opponents.

On-Page Factors

After all, here is the last category that pulls together the remaining ranking factors that impact your website’s overall SEO and Google local ranking positions in the relevant localized SERPs list. While everything should be nearly self-explanatory to that point (i.e., being nearly all the same with the standard on-page SEO), there will be just single core idea for you to remember about. I mean that every on-page element of SEO found directly on your pages (like Page Titles, H1/H2/H3 Headers, Meta Descriptions, Custom Landings, Body Content, URL Structure, Image ALT Tags, etc.) should be optimized hyper-locally when possible. So, all you need is to focus on creating unique and high-quality content for each local landing/service page – and you’re done.