I just completed a course at UCDavis on Optimizing a Website for (Organic) Search. There was a ton of valuable information conveyed in the course, but an area that I found particularly helpful was the section on Local Search. This is valuable for many of my clients that are local businesses that target almost exclusively to local clientele:
Top 10 Localized Organic Factors
- Domain Authority of Website
- Quality/Authority of Inbound Links to Domain
- City,State in GMB Landing Page Title
- Click-Through Rate from Search Results
- Topical (Product/Service) Keyword Relevance of Domain Content
- Diversity of Inbound Links to Domain
- Geographic (City/Neighborhood) Keyword Relevance of Domain Content
- Physical Address in City of Search
- Quality/Authority of Structured Citations
- City, State in Most/All Website Title Tags
These are ranked based on the result of a survey done by Moz, a leading SEO consulting company. Many of these are also true of non-local sites but there are several that are strictly relevant to local organic search results. Having the location prominently displayed throughout the site, from Title Tags to Google My Business pages, as well as content on the website that includes geographic information, is very important. And these changes are easily done on most sites so this is low-hanging fruit for increasing your organic search traffic.
For many businesses, these are great ways to boost traffic and increase sales. If you’d like to learn how to implement these changes, as well as the other more challenging factors like domain authority or inbound links, give me a call or send me an email.