Maximising your local SEO presence

Whether you run a dental practice or a law firm, having a strong online presence could help your business stand out from the competition. In this guide, we are going to cover not only the foundations of your local SEO strategy, but also provide you with some tips to maximise your online presence with cross-channel collaboration.  

Before digging into the details of designing a successful local SEO strategy, it’s first-important to understand the basics. 

What is local SEO?  

Local SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) focuses on optimising your business’s online presence to rank higher in local search results.  

 Google’s algorithm uses a combination of factors to best match the users search. These include: 

• Relevance: This refers to how relevant a business is for each search, so describing your business accurately will help Google understand what your business is about. 

• Distance: Results will appear depending on the distance between the local term use and a business, or a calculated distance from several sources, depending on their availability e.g. the user device location. 

• Prominence: This refers to how popular & well known a business is. Google determines prominence based on the details they have about a business, external links, directories etc. Having a strong SEO presence for core terms will also contribute to the local positioning.  

How to improve your local rankings? 

When designing your local SEO strategy to rank higher on Google, we’d recommend following the below best practices: 

• Having a dedicated page for each location. Each page should be optimised for the relevant localised terms, as well as contain accurate information about your business e.g. opening hours, address, etc. 

• Ensuring these location pages are easily accessible for users & Google. Often businesses link to these pages from the header or the footer of the website. 

• Use structured data to help Google understand your business information e.g. opening hours, reviews etc. Follow schema.org mark-up recommendations for local businesses.  

• Make the most of Google’s Actions Center for bookings, payments or any other actions. For example, if your business is in hospitality, the reservation business link integration allows restaurants to display a link to their main reservation page, to simplify the user journey. 

• Create and optimise your Google My Business profile 

The below image shows the information that is displayed for web results and Google My Business: 

This section probably deserves its own blog post, but the key is to ensure that you provide as many business details as possible. This data should be accurate and updated accordingly when there are any changes e.g. opening times during bank holidays. If in doubt, follow GMB guidelines to adhere to the best practices! 

Top tip:  Use UTM tagging for your Google My Business profile, to track actions users take – such as phone calls or getting directions.  

Maximising your local SEO presence 

Once you’ve covered the basics for your local SEO strategy, we’d like to offer you some tips to enhance your online presence by utilising your other marketing channels. For this, we are going to review content, digital PR, paid & CRO.  

• Content strategy: Creating useful informational content will help your overall organic performance. However, when designing your content strategy, we’d also encourage you to think about how you could localise this content. For example, creating guides or blogs for specific locations, such as ‘things to do in X’ could help build your topical authority for that area, and therefore help Google recognise your business as relevant for local search terms. 

• Digital PR: With one of Google’s algorithms factors being ‘prominence’, it’s clear that building backlinks from external source will help ranking higher. We’d suggest running regional PR campaigns alongside your national ones. 

• Paid Media: The increase in cost per click (CPC) has been a reality for a few years (21% increase YoY in Q1 2024). This means that cross-channel collaboration is key to drive efficiencies; and in this case, paid activity could target those areas where your business isn’t necessarily performing well organically.  

• It takes time to build your organic presence, and the paid channel can help increase your impression share across these local areas. 

• Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO): Whilst the main local SEO marketing goal is to drive traffic to the site, it’s crucial that we encourage this traffic to convert, whether this is driving more showroom appointments, booking a table, or contacting your business. 

• A/B testing on localised pages will help maximise efforts. Analyse current performance and make data lead decisions, to improve a page’s layout and drive more conversions. 

In conclusion, building your local organic presence may take time, but there are clear guidelines to get you started. However, fortunately, working together with your other marketing channels will help you excel and see the benefits faster! 

If you are looking for a local SEO agency to build your organic presence, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Alternatively, you can find out more about our local SEO services online.