Local SEO allows you to position your site on keywords associated with a locality like "pizza in miami". This is important if you have a local business such as a store, a franchise or just if you sell your services locally. Basically, it concerns most professions: craftsmen, tradesmen, coach, consultants, liberal professions etc.

According to my research, it is 7 to 17 times simpler to position oneself on local terms than on national terms. In addition, a study found that 84% of people shopped within 30km of their homes and that 72% of people search online before contacting a professional. In short, you have every interest in optimizing the local SEO of your site.

Here are 4 techniques to improve the local SEO of your site.

1. Create a management page

A management page is a page on which you will provide as much local information as possible on your site. This page must be exhaustive. It should allow you to refer to the name of your city but also to help visitors to your site to see you.

If your site was created with WordPress, you can install Yoast's Local SEO for WordPress plugin. This plugin will save you time by creating a Google map generated from your coordinates. You can also simply add the opening hours of your site, your physical address etc.

Here are all the elements that I advise you to insert on the page "directions" of your site.

    -Physical address in the title, the description and in the page
    -Landline number (with local area code, not 09)
    -A google map (with a link to google map)
    -Recovered images on Google Street view
    -Geographical landlords (subway, church, parking etc.) that allow visitors to find their way around easily
    -Opening hours
    -Accepted means of payment
    -Transit stops / stations to see you
    -Links to your local pages (google plus, google addresses, local Facebook

2. Use curation

To improve the local SEO of your site, it is important to regularly add local content, which speaks about your city. Of course, the goal is to publish content that speaks about your profession or topics complementary to it. I invite you to write and publish articles yourself. That said, you will not have time to publish several articles a week.

So you can use curation. This technique consists of doing the watch. A software will identify for you the best content published on other sites with the keywords you have entered. He will give you a daily list of these contents with a direct link to the site that published them. All you need to do is rewrite the title, the first paragraph and link to the original source. So, it will take you only 30 minutes per day to publish 4 to 5 contents.

Many curation tools allow you to do this work. The best known is scoop.it. But there are also WordPress curation plugins like ExpressCurate.

To use curation, here are the steps to put in place:

    -identify blogs / sites that address local content related to your industry
    -add the urls of these sites in software like scoop.it or expresscurate.com
    -every day, analyze the list of contents and choose 4 or 5
    -re-write the title and first paragraph of each article to avoid duplicate content
    -publish an article by identified content on your own blog
    -make a link to the original source

In this way, you get a good index of freshness since you publish daily local content related to your sector of activity.

3. Create a localized directory

Creating a local directory is one of the best techniques for improving your local SEO. Indeed, by creating a local directory of professionals in your sector, you will have hundreds to see thousands of indexed pages. If the local directory optimization otpimisation is done well, your site will be regularly displayed on the first page of Google. Sites like "best hairdressers" have understood this very well and monopolize many positions on Google. Moreover, with a minimum budget a good developer, you will have almost no content to create since you will retrieve information already available online.

To create a local directory, I advise you to proceed as follows:

    -Buy a dedicated domain name content your keyword
    -Install a directory with a WordPress plugin as a business directory plugin
    -Install a beautiful theme
    -Use a developer to parse other directories
    -Have the presentation texts rewritten
    -Optimize SEO architecture of the directory

4. Get local backlinks

The last technique to improve your local SEO is to set up a netlinking strategy to get local backlinks. The goal is to obtain links from authority sites such as blogs, newspapers, universities, associations, town halls or chambers of commerce.

To do this, you have several possibilities:

    -create lists of resources related to your city and ask the town halls and chambers of commerce if they agree to publish them on their website
    -Contact local blogs and offer them to write guest articles
    -Make press relations to obtain articles and interviews in local newspapers.

Younes Derfoufi

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