Optimising Your Local SEO

Do you have a local business and would like to increase your visibility within search results and help people find you online? Optimising your local SEO can have huge benefits and impact your business with long-term effects. 

With local SEO, our goal is to find, edit and keep track of the information shared by the main local directories to ensure we’re always creating the highest opportunity for visibility within search results.

How can local SEO benefit your site?

For our client, Peldon Rose, we saw some incredible results after focusing on their local SEO strategy. 

The client: Peldon Rose. A London-based firm offering office design and build services to other companies, mostly in London. They were challenged with low visibility in their SERPs, even with targeted local pages and keywords. 

The approach: We built a two-pillar strategy to improve visibility in their core areas:

• Landing page boost: Boosting key service pages’ onsite SEO through copy depth and Q&As;
• Local SEO: Growing Local SEO score through citation building & GMB optimisation

What was achieved:

• +48.7% increase in Organic Sessions Year on Year
• Their key generic term saw a +2,245% increase in impressions Year on Year
• +41.6% increase in assisted conversions driven via Organic Search
• +95% increase in visibility score since the start of onsite optimisations 
• Keywords containing “London” saw a +194% increase in visibility score

How can I implement local SEO for my business?

1. Create a google sheet document (we’ve created a template for you here) that you’ll use to keep track of all the local citations that you gather. Divide the main tab into two main sections:
   • Business information: This section will include information about your business, mainly the so-called NAP information (name of your business, address and phone number), working hours, and whether the citation has photos
   • Account Details: If you come across a citation with wrong information, you’ll have to create an account and update the information on it. This is why you should add three columns defining the username, password and the status of that citation (is it up to date, did you request edits, etc.)
2. Agree with the client on the definitive NAP information for the GMB listings and ensure ownership of listings is in place to allow for future edits
3. Begin building a list of the local citations: our advice is to use Moz Local Listing Tool and Infoserve Listing Manager Checker to start building your list of local directories. Here are some other directories that we suggest adding for businesses that are based in the UK:
   • Yelp.co.uk
   • Yell.com
   • My 118info
4. It’s time to create the accounts on the Local Directories and update the information. Remember that citations must match exactly the name, address and number that you agreed with the client
5. After around 30 days, it’s time to update your Google My Business account. Publish updates to NAP which will trigger Google to fetch citation status and discover the up to date citations
6. The final step is to carry out keyword research and start tracking local terms to keep track of any ranking changes

Additional tips:

• Remember, local SEO is very dependent on the country where your business is operating, so we strongly suggest doing some research on the leading local directories for your country
• Use a schema generator to create a Local Schema markup – Merkle’s Local Business Markup Generator is a great tool 
• Create a UTM URL and add it to your Google My Business to track how many users land on your website through the GMB snippet. Use this tool to create your UTM URL. The main fields that you want to fill out are:
  • Website URL: your domain
  • Campaign source: google
  • Campaign medium: organic
  • Campaign name: gmb

Copy the URL and add it as a website URL to your GMB account. On Google Analytics, you’ll be able to check how many people are landing on your website through the GMB snippet from Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns and then find the tab called “GMB”.

Are you looking to kickstart your local SEO strategy? Get in touch with our team.