How To Use “Near Me” Searches for Local SEO

Having a local business and not having it optimized for local SEO is a mistake you must fix immediately. Leveraging Google’s “near me” searches are the best way to target your local consumers and help them find your business easily in the SERPs.

One of the best ways a local business can leverage digital marketing is by optimizing the local SEO, and here are some of the ways to optimize.

• Updating your Google My Business profile

 If you haven’t registered for Google My Business yet, this should be your first step in optimizing your business for search engine optimization. While creating your profile, ensure you add all the important information, including the address, contact information, and research, and use the keywords relevant to your business and industry.

Adding some photos of your business, business hours, etc., helps rank your business in SEO. 

• Implement Schema Markup

Schema Markup is one of the ways where you can outrank your competitor in the local searches because it assists the search engine in gathering more information about the business and providing them to your target audience in the best way.

A schema markup, for example, is where you can add business hours. If you have a business that is closed on Sunday or on both Saturday and Sunday, then this implementation can help your audience know better. With this implementation, you can also add custom hours in case your business is only available for limited hours on weekends or holidays.

Schema markup implementation needs to be on every location page to be really effective, and it must include the business address, operation hours, and contact information. By adding your homepage schema markup, you can also help your audience know the accuracy of your business information.

• Optimize your site to be mobile-friendly

 Online marketing today targets more mobile users than any other device users, and that means optimizing your local business to be mobile-friendly is a good idea. But that’s not all. To think about it, there are chances that your local audience already knows about the time and place of your business, but it is hard to find a service in a place where someone is travelling it for the first time.

A lot of your audience is a person who is looking for your service on a hand-held device, and this alone makes Google prefer listings with mobile-friendly optimization.

This also demands a mobile-friendly website where a user is looking for more information on your business, like pictures or more about your services or offerings. Many people would reach out to a handheld device instead of a desktop to search for shopping sites or local businesses.

• Create different pages for different target locations

A business can have locations in various cities – a store or a contractor service. In any case, having a business page for each location you serve is the best way to optimize your business. This is because people tend to search for ‘business near [city name].’

You need to optimize all the pages for ‘near me’ searches by leveraging various factors. Some of the factors are:

1. URL: Choose a user-friendly URL, preferably mentioning the city name.
2. Meta tags: don’t forget to optimize the meta title and meta description.
3. Alt tags: Help Google understand what your image or videos are about.

Conclusion

Optimizing your listing for Google is a modern way of doing any business – whether you are a bookstore or a dentist. You can also share review forms with your customers to share their reviews which helps you build the credibility of your business.