Local SEO Strategy: Setting a Foundation & Optimization Strategies

How To Get Started With a Local SEO Strategy

In order to make sure you lay the foundation for any successful Local SEO strategy, it’s important to remember three things:

Proper tracking
NAP consistency
Get the right tools

Using Proper Tracking for all Local Tactics

When we say tracking, we mean making sure that anything that can be tracked, IS tracked. Let’s say you have a Google My Business Listing for a variety of store locations in the same state - if you don’t have UTM parameters set up on your URLs, it’s going to be tough to know how effective your local strategy is in the future.

NAP Consistency

If you’re looking into a local strategy then I’m sure you have heard of Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP) consistency as a major element of importance for Local SEO. While this is not so much a ranking factor, it’s more common sense for your user.

If you have one location that moved and the phone number and address aren’t correct or are mixed between listings, a user could go to the wrong location and have a bad customer experience. This could affect customer trust and your bottom line over time.

Get the Right Local SEO Tools

Make sure you’re tracking the success of your Local SEO Strategy with the following:

Proper keyword tracking by zip code or state levels at minimum for priority keywords.
If you’re trying to manage hundreds of listings on multiple platforms (i.e. Yelp), get yourself the right local listing management tool to save yourself time in the long run. Here are a few to check out:
- Moz Local
- Whitespark
- BrightLocal

Local SEO Optimization Checklist

Note to the reader: These are not in exact order, but meant to be a general overview to get you started.

Step 1: Set up Google My Business (GMB) listings with proper addresses, phone numbers, images, URLs, hours of operation and category tags.
Step 2: Make sure Google My Business listings have UTM parameters set up so you can determine which listings are driving conversions and traffic.
Step 3: Claim rogue listings with your brand name that are not owned by your company.
Step 4: Be sure to respond to both positive and negative reviews on Google My Business Listings.

Fun fact: We found that if a business did not respond to reviews, they tended to rank lower according to our 2019 Local Search Success Indicators Study. This doesn’t necessarily mean that responding to reviews is a direct ranking factor, but in terms of user experience and perception, these are elements users pay attention to and so should you.
Step 5: Make sure you have a locations page on your website that lists correct addresses and phone numbers for any listings you have.
Step 6: Clean up social profiles to reflect proper addresses and phone numbers, logos, and URLs.
Step 7: Utilize your paid data to inform your organic Local SEO strategy.
- Use a search term report to see if users type in different county, city, or zip codes modifiers and convert.
- See what questions users are asking with various local modifiers from PPC campaigns and create localized content based on answering those questions.