3 Tips to Improve Your Local SEO for 2023

Local SEO has acquired an increasingly important place in recent years. Are you a merchant, craftsman, in a web agency or do you exercise a liberal profession? Your visibility on the internet necessarily involves local SEO optimization of your website. Local SEO is an effective lever to increase your visibility in a targeted way. Since Google has allowed maps in search results, it is essential as elements to develop your online presence via geolocated queries.

In this article, we will bring you the essential elements to answer your questions on this subject.

The 3 tips for successful local SEO

1) Create a business profile on Google My Business

Google My Business is a service offered by Google, it is primarily intended for companies that wish to gain visibility locally. It is a cornerstone of your local SEO: having a business profile on Google My Business will allow you to appear in Google Maps, to collect consumer opinions more easily, to share news about the life of your business.

First of all you must check that your listing has not been automatically generated by Google or claimed by a third party. If this is the case, you must claim your My Business page with supporting documents, otherwise you can directly optimize your local SEO page.

Then after giving local information specific to your business:

• Address
• Areas served or catchment area
• Phone numbers
• Schedules, it is possible to enter holidays or exceptions
• A short name to make it easier for your customers to find you
• you must then select a category. For this important point, it is natural to seek to put the keywords on which you have positioned yourself.

It’s also possible that you won’t find exactly what you want in Google’s proposals, but you still have to choose something that accurately describes your activity. You can take inspiration from your local competitors to find out which categories they have chosen. You can also complete these categories later by selecting secondary categories in the options of your file, in order to cover all your activities.

You can also enter several URLs to create CTAs directly from your My Business page. For example, adding a URL for booking, making appointments or even a menu for a restaurant, all these URLs will complete your file and offer alternative options to the user, completing their user experience on the search engine.

It is also possible to fill in your products directly in the My Business file in order to create a small product file directly in the local pack. Even if it seems tedious for e-commerce sites with large catalogs, it is a practical alternative for those wishing to engage in merchandising around their brand.

As with the categories, it is also recommended to complete your services in order to best correspond to the reality on the ground. Indeed, if you perform additional services, or quite simply if you go home or offer a delivery service, it is natural to provide this information.

You can then complete the “attributes” or “highlights” of your company. There are two types, the factual, for example the presence of a terrace or the management of the establishment carried out by women. The second are the subjective attributes, they depend mainly on your customer reviews. These attributes are offered from a predefined list depending on your chosen category.

Finally, it is natural to take photos of your business and your activity. The quality of the photos is important to attract Internet users, but their metadata is also important for Google. Indeed, to offer the best photos at the right time Google needs to know if they are indoors, outdoors, the team, the brand identity or your documented activity. You will then select the photo for the cover and so on. It is also possible to optimize the metadata of your photographs (and therefore its positioning) by adding a geographical location with the online tool Geoimgr .

We have produced a dedicated article that gives you the best tips to appear first on Google My Business .

2) Obtain customer reviews

Google pays particular attention to consumer reviews, this is what proves that your company has activity and that it provides a service adapted to its customers so that they are satisfied. In many cases, Google brings up the best addresses, the more positive the comments from your customers, the more your local referencing will increase.

However, naturally, people will be more likely to criticize you than praise you. It is then a question of encouraging the customers with whom you have had a good experience to write a good opinion , and above all of responding well to dissatisfied customers because a good response from you can underline your desire to improve your service.

It is not easy for everyone to find the right establishment when you want to give a review on Google. To make it easier for your customers, you can create a direct link to the review form. For this you need your Place ID, associated with your company name and which you can find here .

3) Register on local directories and netlinking to obtain quotes

There are many professional directories such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, Les Heures, Pages Jaunes, Michelin, Kompass, Cylex-locale, etc. which allow you to obtain valuable inbound links, or more precisely “quotes”, that is to say an association of local information such as your physical address, your number and the url, which will improve your natural referencing and your visibility for free. You can also target local information sites, the sites of local associations, the site of your town hall, your tourist office or even the site of the chamber of commerce and industry in your region. You can also exchange links with partner companies that offer services or products that are complementary to yours and located in a geographical area close to you.

Optimizing your “quotes” is part of having a good SEO strategy. Rich snippets are also generated by the structured data of your site, and include the local pack of local SEO, so you must be careful to respect the structure expected by the Google robot, which you can check with the verification tool structured data .

In addition, all on-site optimizations and with an SXO perspective work in accordance with local SEO, the latter being a component of SEO in general. If you want to give a boost to your local business then you need to hire the best local SEO agency.