5 Essential Ways to Audit Your Local SEO
Local SEO is an indispensable part of running a business website. In this mobile era, almost anyone will use the web to search for the services and products they need. With this, your business should be fully optimized to be on top of the search results.
Take note that businesses that rank high on SERPs will enjoy as much as 33% of the search traffic. This means higher conversion rates and click-through. So if your website is performing poorly in terms of SEO, you’re missing something big.
Importance of local SEO
Local SEO is a more specific approach to optimization. Moreover, businesses need to target their audience locally through the use of location modifier keywords like “XYZ near me” or “where to find XYZ near me”.
Not yet convinced that local SEO is crucial? Hear us out: 88% of internet users who searched for a specific business or product will visit or call the business that ranked high on the same day.
This speaks a lot about traffic, conversions, click-through rates, and warm leads.
So can you enjoy this? Start with a local SEO audit.
- Monitor your metadata and keywords
The first thing you have to do is to select seven keywords you want to rank locally. Make sure that you optimize this on each post’s SEO title and meta description.
Also, use H2 and H3 headers as it merits. Moreover, use the H1 header once on your main header only. This way, Google won’t penalize your website.
- Audit your citations and listings
Next, look up each keyword and see if the search results will show your business listings and citations. If not, you may need to revisit your Google My Business account to fix the problem.
Aside from that, list your business to as many directories as possible. For beginners, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and YellowPages are staples.
- Audit your website content
This part is connected to your keyword audit. Aside from optimizing the keyword on your headers, you should also integrate it on your copy.
Moreover, don’t overkill the keyword optimization, as this will lead to keyword stuffing.
Most of all, you should always write unique and quality copy. Never resort to plagiarized, spun, or aggregated content. Soon enough, Google will detect this and punish your website.
- Audit your backlinks
Backlinks are golden in SEO. This builds the reputation of your website in terms of ranking and indexing. To perform a backlink audit, you can use the free backlink analysis tool from Moz. It will provide you with comprehensive statistics of every URL you’ll enter.
Aside from that, the Moz tool will indicate the anchor text used for backlinking, the source of the backlink, and the authority score of the linking site.
- Focus on your social media pages
If you’re keen to rank locally, you should never neglect your social media pages. Take time to engage with your followers, respond to messages, and address complaints.
Aside from that, see to it that you post regular content to update your account. This way, your followers will know that the page is still in operation.
