A step-by-step guide to getting started with local SEO and learning how to improve your visibility in local search results to attract more customers in your area.
Ieva Treiliha
There are thousands of searches made every day by potential customers looking for products and services in their local area. Local SEO is search engine optimisation focused specifically on local queries, ensuring people in your region can find you when searching for products and services nearby.
Local SEO includes all the optimisations you implement to help your business gain greater visibility and higher keyword rankings in specific local areas. This means being found for relevant searches in targeted locations. Local SEO is relevant for all search engines, whether you are aiming to rank on Google, Bing, or another search platform.
There are numerous ways a customer can find a local business – Google, Apple Maps, Tripadvisor, Yelp, and Bing are just some of the most popular methods. However, Google holds a 97% market share in Denmark, making it the largest and most used channel – so, as a Danish business, this should be your primary focus when it comes to local SEO.
So far, so good – but how do you rank for local searches in your area? You will find tips further down in this blog post. 🙂
Before you begin optimising for local searches near you, there is one crucial thing you need to have in place – your website must be mobile-friendly.
51% of online sales in Denmark come from mobile devices, and 61% of those searching from their mobiles are more likely to contact a local business with a mobile-optimised website.
Mobile devices are the future, so it is essential that your website or webshop is mobile-friendly. You can read more about mobile optimisation and why it is especially important for online retail in my blog post about mobile shopping here.
An easy way to test if your website is mobile-friendly is to use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool. If your site is not mobile-friendly, your first priority should be to make improvements. If it feels overwhelming, feel free to contact us here!
To rank locally, you should focus on location-oriented searches. These are different from the keywords you typically use for organic rankings.
Example:
Let’s say you are a glazier and want to reach potential customers nearby. To rank highly in your local area, you should focus on keywords such as:
Once you have identified the relevant keywords you want to rank for locally, it is important that your website contains the necessary information for Google to display it. Specific local searches appear differently on Google compared to standard search results. See the examples below:
To find inspiration for local ranking keywords, you can use a competitor’s name and see what Google suggests as related searches, or look at your existing keywords from a different perspective – what would someone search for if they urgently needed to find your business?
Google My Business is indispensable for local rankings and is perhaps the most important tool for succeeding with local SEO. Google My Business makes it easier for customers to find and contact you.
Google My Business (GMB) gathers all the essential information customers need about your business: contact details, address, reviews, and possibly FAQs. Google’s aim is to show users the most relevant and accurate results, matching their queries – with GMB, everything is shown in one place.
All you need to do is find or create your business on GMB, confirm that you are the owner and then edit your business details. We actually have a guide to Google My Business, which you can find here!
Once you have created a profile and filled in your business information on GMB, you have a solid foundation for being displayed when people search for products and services in your local area. There are several factors that determine whether it is you or your competitor shown in Google’s local results, but the most decisive is relevance.
For Google, relevance means your business has customer reviews, your information is correct, you have local citations, and several other factors.
Once your Google My Business profile is set up, you can appear in Google’s local results. These local results, also known as the “Google 3 Pack” or “Local 3 Pack” in English, are the first results you see when searching for a location near you. Local results are the top three most relevant businesses in your area. See the two examples below, where I search for “Lunch near me” and “Lunch Ikast”:
The results in the red frame are, in Google’s view, the most relevant local results. The results you see just below are the standard organic search results. Data shows that local results receive 33% of all clicks, while organic results receive 40%. Therefore, as a business owner, it is attractive to be visible in both the local results and high on the first page of Google’s organic results.
Whether you appear in Google’s local results depends largely on your GMB profile, but not only that. It is also worth remembering to implement Schema markup on your website.
Schema markup, or structured data, helps Google understand the data your website contains and can have an influence on your organic keyword positions.
With structured data, Google can better see what each landing page on your website contains, which in turn helps your pages to be ranked better in search results.
Today, working with structured data is much less complicated than a few years ago. You can take advantage of the Google Structured Data Markup Helper to mark up data on your landing pages, and the tool will generate a snippet of code for you to place in the correct location on your website.
If you are unsure whether there is Schema markup on your site, you can always use the Google Structured Data Testing Tool to check for structured data on any page. If so, you can also see what information has been marked up.
An important on-page optimisation to remember for local SEO is your landing pages. The landing pages you want to rank with should be optimised for local SEO.
On these selected landing pages, focus on a relevant keyword and location, for example, Glazier Ikast. The most important places to optimise for local searches are the page title, meta description, your H-tags (headings), and the body text.
If you want to rank in several cities or areas, you should create landing pages tailored to each of these locations.
Let’s use the same example as before – you are a glazier in Ikast. If you want to rank in Ikast, but also in Herning and Brande, you should have landing pages optimised for searches such as glazier Ikast, glazier Herning, and glazier Brande.
Link building is a major part of search engine optimisation, including when it comes to local SEO. Google sees links from other sites to yours as a kind of recommendation – if others link to you, Google assumes you have expertise and authority in your field. Google wants to show its users the best and most relevant results, so inbound links are highly significant for your ranking positions.
To establish local authority, you should also focus on links from domains within your local area. A strong link profile with links from credible, local domains is key to achieving high keyword rankings locally. This can include local news sites, area guides, and blog articles from bloggers in your region.
If you have a business in, for example, Herning, you can find various news media, guides/directories, and bloggers from the local area and contact them about link building opportunities. Perhaps they would be interested in writing about your company, arranging a guest blog, or something entirely different that suits both the channel and your brand. You can read more about link building here: How to do link building.
The key focus for local SEO should be your content and its relevance.
It may seem like a lot to keep track of, but if you put yourself in your visitors’ shoes – wouldn’t it be important for you to find all this information if you were searching for a product or service in your local area?
If you think a stronger focus on local marketing is exactly what your business needs, you can read more about how WeMarket can help you with local SEO here! – A solution we have developed for those who want to give local marketing more attention.
If you have questions or would like help with local SEO, please get in touch by filling out our contact form or by calling 71 99 34 74.
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