7 Local Ranking Factors For Local SEO

If your business has a physical office or store, it'll be of immense benefit to build a local SEO campaign. Getting traffic from local searches is one of the best ways for business owners to brand on the Internet and bring in a regular stream of local customers. The problem is that many local business owners don't have a clue about how to get their website ranked in the top search results for their desired local search terms.

Here are some of the local SEO factors that contribute to local rankings:

1. Proper Onpage Optimization - In order to set your website up for success, it's vital that you place it in the proper categories. You should also have the name of your business on the title as well as the main keyword you're targeting for local searches. One thing you should avoid is trying to stuff keywords into your title and descriptions to get an advantage.

2. NAP Consistency and Citations - NAP (name, address and phone number) has long been a strong ranking factor in local search. To get the maximum value out of citations, you must make sure that your NAP is consistent all across the board. It's also becoming more important to get citations from other local businesses, particularly businesses that are somehow related to yours.

3. Backlinks - It wasn't too long ago that you could simply build citations and rank highly in the local results. In order to compete in local search today, you have to build backlinks. Don't target low quality backlinks as the search engines will probably adhere to the Panda and Penguin updates. Try to get links for authority and related sites.

4. User Reviews - Reviews from Google+, Yelp, Zagat and other sites are all signals that will help your local business website rank higher. When relevant, ask your customers if they're satisfied with your business and get them to write a positive review for your site. Don't rely on customers randomly leaving reviews because very few of them will do so.

5. Social Signals - Social signals such as Google+ likes, Facebook likes, and tweets will all help your website rank higher in the local results. That's why it's important for you to engage your audience on these social networking sites. One thing that many business owners have reported is that posting fresh content on their social media accounts also boosted rankings.

6. User Behavior - User behavior indicates to Google how relevant your website is to the user. Everything from your clickthrough rate, time spent on site, check-ins, and click to call actions will improve your rankings. That's why your focus should be on providing the most relevant website and the best user experience. You will have to play around with different website designs, structures and copy to see what results in the best user experience.

7. Authorship - Google authorship will make a big impact on local search rankings. By posting relevant content as an author, you'll attract more attention to your local website. This will result in more links, followers and social signals. There isn't much research on how much author content will affect the local search results, but you should still use authorship to prepare for possible future changes.

Those are the local search engine optimization ranking factors that you should be focusing on. There are many more ranking factors but the seven listed here have the most impact on local search rankings. As a final tip, rather than try to focus on the volume of links and citations, aim to get references from authority sites and quality sites that are related to yours. This will build the foundation for long term local search success.

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