Top Indianapolis Local SEO Tips You Need to Know

What Should Small Business Owners do to Improve their SEO Locally?

The most essential factor in enhancing your local SEO is content creation. That is why creating original content will help optimize your business substantially, especially for a small/local business. Digital.com, a leading independent review website for small business online tools, products, and services, suggests that if you need help with your local SEO goals, you should reach out to one of the best SEO agencies in Indianapolis.

SEO is Search Engine Optimization, and the goal is to make lots of changes to your online presence that may seem insignificant, but as a whole, SEO helps internet users find what they are looking for. Check out the ins and outs to understand SEO further.

Let’s dive into some useful tips that will help guide you to perform better local SEO-wise.

Tip 1: Creating Content for Each Target Location

Dedicating all of your content to one page does not help your local SEO since it will lower your potential ranking on search engines. For example, if your business has various locations, it would be smart to have a page that is correlated with each different place. THIS IS THE HARD PART. What can you create that would be local to the area you service PLUS able to get all the SEO elements such as title tag, H1/H2 tags, and so forth. How can you help the user and help google find you for locations that you serve? This is not an easy thing to do without being annoying and spammy. It takes careful consideration of your content planning. See what I did in the title of this article? Is this really about Indianapolis local SEO, well it can be but these strategies can be applied everywhere.

Having multiple pages makes navigation easier for customers to find what they are looking for as well, people want local they want information on their area, not the whole DMA. This is beneficial for you too since you can add more information onto that page about the product or service instead of cramming it all into one.

Tip 2: What are the Keywords Your Audience is Using with Local SEO?

Well, before you can create content you need to understand your audience will help you use local keywords that will appeal more to those who are being targeted. Google as its own Keyword Planner, which is a free resource to use to generate ideas for your keyword search. Generally, this is used for Google Ads, but it can be used to identify keywords to use on website pages such as product pages, blog posts, landing pages, etc. However, if you are trying to rank for keywords, you might want to think otherwise.

Tip 3: How to Promote Your Local SEO Content

While creating an advertisement or posting for something, it will be important to relate the content to your audience in that specific area. For example, if there was a charity or sponsor event happening in Indianapolis, our team would want to create a certain post that correlated with our experience at the event. This is a really easy thing to do so show locality to an area but not everyone does events. BUT if you are serving an area what is unique to that area? Pictures? Pictures are awesome and show authenticity to your brand. Don’t overthink it, an iPhone works just fine. This content we lead too could be blogs, videos, etc. Showcasing that your business has participated in the community will help capture those locally. Remember that organic social posting will help you indirectly with SEO by virtual driving traffic to the website that will spend time on the website and Google measures dwell time. Dwell time is the amount of time that users are spending on a page. If they are spending more time then your content is engaging! If you are not sure what should be on your landing page experience, check out this article.

Let’s Dive a Little More Into These Social Media Pages

Being on the social media platforms that you think are best for your business is ideal because it is free advertising. Did you also know According to Animoto’s latest survey, 58% of consumers visit a brand’s social pages before ever visiting their website? And that’s an 81% increase from last year! When these consumers visit your social pages, it’s the organic content you’ve shared that they’ll see. When someone is researching your business, Google will crawl and get results from the social media pages that you are on from your activity on each respective platform. On your website, list the social media pages your business is on. A common way to do this is to have an image of each social media logo at the bottom of the page and once a customer clicks the image they will be brought to that specific page. Another thing, encouraging people to review and leave comments on your pages will help boost your local SEO.

Tip 4: Creating Local Backlinks

A backlink is a link that comes from one website and goes to another website. This is another tactical way to boost your local SEO because it is actually easier for smaller/local businesses to build backlinks than franchises and bigger stores. Local businesses generally have the support of the community, and with that, they can reach out to other businesses, local newspapers, etc. for a backlink. Having more backlinks is better because they are an indicator to Google that your content quality is strong enough that others will use it within their own content. This will help with ranking higher on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

Tip 5: Online Business Directories

Websites such as Yelp, MapQuest, Yellow Pages, Foursquare, etc. are online business directories. Utilizing these websites and having your business name, phone number, address, backlink to your website, and a detailed description of your website will be beneficial to help increase your local SEO and brand awareness. On all online business directories that you use, make sure that the information is consistent and updated.

Tip 6: Google My Business – The own everyone needs to OWN.

What is Google My Business?

Google My Business is a free tool that allows you to optimize your Business Profile on Google by entering information that is appealing to people when they search for your business. Information that would be good to have initially is hours of operation, address, description of business, website link, and contact information like a phone number. For those using desktops, the listing will appear on the right side of the screen. For mobile users, it appears at the top or near the top of your device.

Benefits of Google My Business

Creating a Google My Business account is simple. Google does a great job guiding the user throughout each step, making the process easier to complete.
Uploading photos/videos to your Google My Business account will not only be valuable to you but more importantly, to the customers. Having photos/videos of what the business looks like internally and externally is important to do because it gives a visualization of what the customer is coming to. Providing content such as team photos and popular products/services will be useful as well.
Using the reviews/rating feature. Customers can leave a review and a rating out of five stars for your business. Responding to those comments made by customers will help maintain and improve the customer relationship.
Google My Business is accessible on your mobile device as there is a Google My Business app available. The app itself is very user-friendly as it allows you to answer questions and respond to client’s messages, share updates, edit business details such as operating hours, etc.

Tip 7: How does Page Loading Speed Affect Local SEO?

The one thing that we can all agree on is that if a page takes a long time loading then there is going to be a high bounce rate. This proceeds to a higher possibility that the customer who wanted to visit that page is going to search for other sites that are more than likely competitors. Remember that dwell time we were talking about? A page that has been optimized should be loaded within less than three seconds. This could negatively impact your ranking. Checking your PageSpeed Insights allows you to identify why your page is not loading as quickly. There are recommendations made by Google in case you are having any troubles trying to find a solution.

Tip 8: Website is Mobile-Friendly, Why Do We Still Keep Talking About This One. LOL

People are researching reviews, hours, contact information, etc. on their mobile devices so it will be helpful to both parties if the user experience seems seamless. Ensure that your website is not slow or non-responsive, considering how popular mobile searches are, you could be losing customers based on their mobile experience. Also, since searches on mobile devices are now the most popular, Google now has a “mobile-first index”. This means that Google will crawl your mobile site first. If your site is not mobile-friendly this could negatively impact your position in search results that could lead to fewer leads, traffic, and revenue.

Tip 9: How does Voice Search Impact Local SEO?

Voice Search is a type of search that is getting exponentially more common. It would be valuable to you to optimize different searches on how customers will speak into devices asking their questions. Long-tail keywords are used more often in this type of search, and long-tail keywords are those that are composed of three to five words. Understanding that long-tail keywords are more likely to begin with questions starting with the 5 Ws – who, what, when, where, and why. Research suggests that when customers ask questions beginning with the 5 Ws, they are searching for something more specific. It will be vital to start understanding what those long-tail keywords are since this type of search is more popular.

Tip 10: What are the Best WordPress Plugins for Local SEO?

Yoast SEO

The Yoast plugin has been regarded as one of the best to have in order to improve upon your local SEO. This is an amazing plugin since it has so many versatile functions:

Keyword optimization; will find data that will help you determine keywords that are relevant which will help with content creation. They add related keywords and synonyms to help you write original content.
Editing XML sitemaps and adding descriptions/meta titles to pages.
Will detect duplicate content in your post(s) or page(s)
Pays close attention to your important pages and informs you if there has been no updated content on those pages within a six-month timeframe.
The plugin itself gets updated every two weeks.
Readability check done for all pages. This will detect if paragraphs should be broken up or if you should add certain formatting features like lists or headers.
Yoast SEO has a very good support team and resources.

WPSchema.com

Schema Pro allows you to add code to your website that indicates all the local information to Google such as social profiles, your business’s location, what type of business you are, etc. Also, this is used for search engines like Bing, Google, etc. to help better understand your web page. Businesses that install this plugin to utilize for their websites will have a better ranking in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) than those that don’t. There are various kinds of data markups, such as:

Articles
Local Businesses
Restaurants
Software Applications
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
And Many More!

Google Plugins

WP Google Maps is known as the most apprehended plugin for embedding Google Maps despite there being so many other plugins options. This is a serviceable plugin considering that it allows you to create custom maps with many location markers for locations within the same area. Another benefit of this plugin is that it can help customers visualize the directions to get to your business. Google’s Streetview is automatically enabled as well, and you can upload images of your location’s storefront.

Google Places Reviews is a plugin that solely focuses on online reviews and this is a favorable plugin to have knowing how reviews have such an impact on businesses. This plugin will showcase up to three business reviews per location. On this plugin, information such as the business name, website Google+ page, and more will appear. There are widget themes available to choose from that are light and dark color schemes. You can decide on what customizable theme coordinates with your website the best.

Wrap-Up

The Effects of Local SEO:

Helps customers find you
Business information is available via desktop or mobile device
Makes your business more credible
Increases traffic on your website
Increases online visibility
Helps you compete with other similar local businesses

All these tips and resources can be used to your own advantage to improve your local SEO. Making your SEO better is a tedious, yet worthful task. Make sure that you are always up to date and updating information where it is necessary. This is an easy way to be ahead of your competitors. And remember, content creation is a monumental factor in strengthening your local SEO. Original content may take longer to create, but it allows you to create content that coincides with your business overall. Copying content will not help your local SEO as search engines will identify that information from other/larger companies who are ranked higher on SERP (Search Engines Results Page).