Tips for Local SEO in 2015

Published on February 17, 2015

If your business targets your local audience, undoubtedly, local SEO is very important to you. As in traditional, in local SEO also many tactics change.

How to optimize your page for local searches in 2015? I want to share with you a few basic tips for local SEO optimization for this year.

  • Content

Content is important not only in traditional SEO but in local as well. Put quality keyword-targeted content on the home page. If you have no content on your home page or if it as short as 2 or 3 sentences, you need to add to be able to rank better for the targeted keywords in the local search results. So, the first thing to do when optimizing a page for local SEO is to provide your homepage with the quality content. Don’t forget to include your city and state information in it. To show local relevancy, also include the above information in your heading (H1 tag).

  • Keywords in the content

While it is good to have keywords on the home page, it’s not about spamming. You can see on some of the websites a list of cities/countries separated by commas, trying to rank for all of the words. This is something you should never do as it does not help ranking at all.

  • Title tag

The title tag is one of the main ranking factors for the local search. Include your city and state in your title tag. You have 500px width of title tag and try to keep to this number. Put the main keyword in the beginning and the company name in the end. For instance: Online Marketing and Web Development Company | SEO Century.

Do not stuff your title tag with keywords.

  • Images / Alt Attribute

As you know Google bot cannot see an image, but it can definitely read your alt attribute for the image. Don’t miss this opportunity of including keyword (city, state) in alt. This will help you boost local relevancy and improve rankings.

  • NAP

Name – Address – Phone number – this is a golden rule for local SEO. You should always keep consistent the name, address and phone number of your business.

  • URL

Finally, about the URLs. Include your city and state information in the URL. This is a strong signal in the local search.

The idea of optimizing your website in local search results is simple – it is to do all the above naturally. After that you need to earn awesome links and citations which will help you do even better in your local search strategy.

While the above tips may sound very basic to you, many websites still miss good alt attributes or proper titles (sometimes they are either desperately long or short), as well as important information on the home page, etc.

For more information, check out local search rankings survey from Moz.