By Jonathan Barber
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO brings some of the most targeted ready to buy customers straight to your business. These are the people who open up google maps on their phone and search “auto shop”, they’ll see a quick glance of the closest and highest rated auto shops in their area. There’s a lot less competition than on Google Local Search so it’s much easier to rank higher. Your competitors have already taken notice and started improving their local SEO, and you’re at a disadvantage if you continue to ignore it.
Review websites will create a profile for you and people will be able to find you through Google Maps or by asking SIRI even if you don’t put in any effort. Create or claim a Google My Business page, this will improve your visibility. Also create or claim a Yelp page, remember the more local listing pages that you have the higher your visibility is. Google will also rank you higher if you keep these pages up to date and the information matches on each page. You can also link your website on your listings, many automotive shops that I work with see an increased traffic flow to their website.
“There’s a lot less competition than on Google Local Search so it’s much easier to rank higher.”
One of the most effective and easy ways to rank higher on local SEO is to get more reviews online. Google and other search engines rank businesses with more positive reviews higher because they want their users to be happy. What makes their users happy is going to the highest rated search results that are the closest to their location. Getting more reviews is fairly straightforward, you just have to ask, there strategies that you can use to funnel reviews to the review website of your choosing.
Citations
Another easy way to rank for local SEO is to get citations from other websites. Google loves to see that other authoritative websites point to your page. For example if you have a Google my business page, create a Yahoo local page with the same name phone number or address. Google will reward you if they see that all of your information is up to date across each website. Google will also reward you based on the number of citations you have. Some of my clients have over 100 citations, you can use a citation aggregator like Yext to automatically submit citations for you.
Follow these starting points and you’ll be ranked higher very shortly.
There’s a lot more to local SEO than what I’ve covered, this article covers the very basics. Stay tuned and we’ll be going more into depth in future articles.
If you’re interested in learning more, chat with an expert about how we can craft an effective marketing strategy for your automotive business.