One of the main reasons we're able to outperform our competition (and our clients' competition) on a daily basis is attention to detail. Above and beyond the steps below, every detail about your company online affects your ability to organically rank for valuable keywords. Local SEO isn't one thing — it's a hundred things, done in the right order.
Laying the Foundation for Search Engines
Setting up a Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) can be the simplest process or the most complex — it depends on the industry you're in and whether you're a home-based business. We start with Google Business Profile optimization first because this is where most people online choose from when looking for a local business in their area.
After getting your Google Business Profile set up, Google will index the web to find other places that list your business. These are called directory citations. Accuracy of your name, address, phone number, and hours of operation — to name a few points — is crucial to getting your business to rank for keywords in Google Search.
If you want help with this foundation, we cover it in the how to choose the best local SEO company guide.
Building Directory Citations
Most search engine optimization companies use sites like Yext.com and Synup.com to build a set of directory citations and then just add new content to the same ones. You should be building new citations every month, or at least every quarter. Adding new citations is an easy way to be deemed more relevant in Google Search than your competitors.
Be careful not to add more than about 70 directory citations in the first month, and no more than 20 to 30 a month after that. Doing less is okay. Doing too many will result in a spamming approach that could result in an actual loss of rankings.
Dumping 500 directory citations into a brand-new Google Business Profile in week one isn't aggressive marketing — it's a textbook footprint pattern that Google's local algorithm flags as low-quality. Pace matters more than volume.
Content Marketing
In the search engine optimization industry, we all know how important content is. Targeting blog articles about the geographical location your services are in — combined with a deeper dive on the relevant information about what you do — can be a quick way to rise in rankings.
Linking those blogs to service pages and other related blogs on your website further anchors the relevancy you offer to a search engine visitor by establishing a semantic cloud of information around the links internal to your site.
Here at Clickflame, we go one step further and build guest posts of highly relevant content and then link them to very relevant blogs on your website. We call these parallel back-links. Regardless of how great your content is, it's better to put out the best content you can than to put out nothing at all.
Speed & Performance
An often-overlooked portion of a local search engine marketing campaign is the speed and performance of your website. While this is a great step for improving organic rankings, it's also important because the better the user experience your website shows to people that came through your Google Business Profile, the better that profile will rank in the local map pack.
We check speed and performance using GTmetrix, then repair all issues so your site is as close to a one-second load time and 100% performance score as possible. This is one of the main reasons our company ranks all over the world for the phrase "best local SEO company."
See our portfolio for examples — ABC Lock and Safe is a 56-file static HTML build deployed via Netlify with sub-second load times. That's what page-speed-as-strategy looks like in practice.
What To Do Next
If you're a decent digital marketer, this article hopefully helped. We also offer done-for-you services if you need help. If you feel like you could just use some extra help and have questions, reach out at support@clickflame.com or via our contact page.
Feel free to send useful tips or tricks you use that may be of help for this article. For all the companies out there just looking to rank better on their own, stay tuned for more detailed articles about how we do what we do.