Experts Give Their Best Tips on Local SEO
Posted: Sat Dec 07, 2024 8:49 am
Local SEO is an essential part of any modern digital strategy. For businesses both large and small, neglecting local SEO can mean losing customers.
In fact, a study by Google found that 50% of people who perform a local search on mobile visit a store within 24 hours . What’s more, local search results are exploding , with “ nearby” searches that include “can I buy” or “to buy” increasing by more than 500%.
But many companies neglect to focus on local SEO. Our experts from all over Europe give their best tips based on their experience in their own regions, explaining how you can boost your local SEO with just a few small changes.
Top Local SEO tips from SEO experts
Tobias Hyldeborg
SEO and Webanalytics specialist at Quisma Denmark (part of GroupM)
What are your top tips for local SEO in your country/city/region?
If you’re a service company france mobile phone numbers database you should create pages for each city you’re active in. If you’re offering your services nationwide, this is a big project, but it’s possible to prioritize cities based on search volume, importance to your business, and SEO competition. This should mean you can generate results pretty quickly.
This technique won’t help you much in the Local Pack, but it will definitely help you in the regular, organic results just below the Local Pack. In the Nordics at least, many businesses have pages automatically generated for this purpose, so it’s possible to get great results by just adding a few hundred words.
Don’t forget to show these pages some love! While the pages are primarily created for SEO purposes, you will still need to promote them on your site, specifically creating internal links to them. A great way to do this is to link to all of them from your ‘Contact’ or ‘Locations’ pages, and then link to nearby cities on specific pages.
What tactics do you think are less effective in your country/city/region compared to general recommendations for local SEO?
Following Google’s guidelines for Google My Business business names. It’s possible to gain visibility in general searches without adding keywords to your business name, but you’ll see results much faster with just one keyword.
I have yet to see a company penalized for using keywords in their company name, at least in the Nordics. Don’t overuse them, but a single keyword behind your actual company name can help you succeed in the Local Pack.
What are some of the best examples of local businesses in your country/city/region that are really doing well in the Local Pack/Finder results?
It’s always interesting to see how companies that you wouldn’t necessarily call local embrace local SEO. Interflora in Denmark is a really good example. They’ll never make it into a local pack, but by creating local pages, they’re able to meet both the searcher’s intent of sending flowers and contacting a local florist in the area.
If you compare this to how other websites match a consumer with a local business, such as a website that allows users to order fast food, they often only serve the purpose of picking up the product and do not display the businesses address and phone number.
Of course, this is what the company is most interested in, but in SEO we can see that behavior is becoming more important. By 'forcing' the user's intent instead of offering them all the options, you risk a competitor who wants to match the user's intent gradually taking over your top position.
Tobias Hyldeborg is SEO and Webanalytics Expert at Digital Marketing Agency Quisma in Denmark. He also writes about SEO, Webanalytics and Online Marketing on his own blog and recently published an article about the best local citation sites in Denmark.
Matthew Kay
Head of Operations at Aira
What are your top tips for local SEO in your country/city/region?
Some factors commonly associated with local SEO, like reviews and how close your business is to the searcher, are hard to control — so my best advice is to focus on the things you can control. Sure, you can ask for reviews and do some outreach to try to build some links. While these are part of your strategy, these tactics rely on others doing the work for you. That leaves other areas you can control to give yourself the best chance of showing up in the SERPs.
Ensuring ‘hygiene’ factors like including the name of the city or town you’re targeting in your page copy, meta title, title tags etc. is a must, but it’s also important to make sure you’re optimising your Google My Business (GMB) pages as much as possible.
The most important element of GMB optimization is categorization – if you don’t choose the right categories, you can pretty much forget about showing up for your target phrases. Get those GMB pages verified and make sure to include details like a company description, hours of operation, photos, services, etc. Everything makes a difference, so take the time to include as much information as you can.
Among the things you can check are authoritative and accurate citations. We divide citations into two categories: general and niche.
General citations are generally more reliable – Sites like Yelp are a great example of general citations that can give you more authority than niche directories. Niche citations focus on either a geographic area or a specific topic/topic. Examples include business directories that focus on a specific area, like a city, or an industry, like construction or recruiting.
Citations are a great way to create a steady stream of links to your site with relatively little effort. If you don’t have the resources to do it yourself, I’ve found Whitespark’s citation building service to be extremely valuable and doesn’t break the bank at just a few dollars per citation. Whichever way you go, make sure your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) are consistent across all directories. This goes for Google My Business and beyond, or you may have issues with Google ranking your site in mapped listings!
What tactics do you think are less effective in your country/city/region compared to general recommendations for local SEO?
I think social media is a big failure in this regard - I've rarely seen instances where social media is overly beneficial for rankings other than making sure you get good reviews on some other platforms like Facebook for local SEO - and even that's not a direct correlation to rankings. It's more likely to be the effect of someone seeing the review, visiting the restaurant, and then promoting the restaurant through their own review or referrals.
I’ve seen mixed results for reviews. I think reviews are incredibly important beyond the actual SEO impact. We’ve made an effort to get more reviews for some of our clients, and it hasn’t made a difference for some key terms and phrases. In some cases, we’ve ranked higher than our competitors even when our reviews are in the double digits, despite having no reviews at all. This is something I’d like to test further, but there are so many variables that it’s hard to know how much of an impact reviews really have.
Overall though, the best practice advice for local SEO is pretty solid!
What are some of the best examples of local businesses in your country/city/region that are really doing well in the Local Pack/Finder results?
Of course I’m biased, but our client Just Tyres had their best two months ever in terms of website revenue in the last three months! We’re constantly building links to their site using attributions. They have a slight advantage because they have about 40 local stores, so for every general attribution – that is, a attribution that’s not focused on a geographic area – we can generate more. This is harder for a business with only three or four locations.
Matthew Kay is the Operations Manager of Aira, a digital marketing agency based in Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
Luke Fitzgerald
Head of SEO at Wolfgang Digital
Gustavo Pelogia
SEO Expert at Wolfgang Digital
What are your top tips for local SEO in your country/city/region?
This is a pretty basic topic, but we still see many local businesses in Dublin, Ireland forget the basics. Many large brick-and-mortar retailers ignore simple housekeeping tasks like setting business hours, and a surprising number — over 20% at our last count — have not claimed their own Google My Business profiles. Even if you’re not familiar with SEO, this is a pretty basic topic that most local businesses can understand.
In fact, a study by Google found that 50% of people who perform a local search on mobile visit a store within 24 hours . What’s more, local search results are exploding , with “ nearby” searches that include “can I buy” or “to buy” increasing by more than 500%.
But many companies neglect to focus on local SEO. Our experts from all over Europe give their best tips based on their experience in their own regions, explaining how you can boost your local SEO with just a few small changes.
Top Local SEO tips from SEO experts
Tobias Hyldeborg
SEO and Webanalytics specialist at Quisma Denmark (part of GroupM)
What are your top tips for local SEO in your country/city/region?
If you’re a service company france mobile phone numbers database you should create pages for each city you’re active in. If you’re offering your services nationwide, this is a big project, but it’s possible to prioritize cities based on search volume, importance to your business, and SEO competition. This should mean you can generate results pretty quickly.
This technique won’t help you much in the Local Pack, but it will definitely help you in the regular, organic results just below the Local Pack. In the Nordics at least, many businesses have pages automatically generated for this purpose, so it’s possible to get great results by just adding a few hundred words.
Don’t forget to show these pages some love! While the pages are primarily created for SEO purposes, you will still need to promote them on your site, specifically creating internal links to them. A great way to do this is to link to all of them from your ‘Contact’ or ‘Locations’ pages, and then link to nearby cities on specific pages.
What tactics do you think are less effective in your country/city/region compared to general recommendations for local SEO?
Following Google’s guidelines for Google My Business business names. It’s possible to gain visibility in general searches without adding keywords to your business name, but you’ll see results much faster with just one keyword.
I have yet to see a company penalized for using keywords in their company name, at least in the Nordics. Don’t overuse them, but a single keyword behind your actual company name can help you succeed in the Local Pack.
What are some of the best examples of local businesses in your country/city/region that are really doing well in the Local Pack/Finder results?
It’s always interesting to see how companies that you wouldn’t necessarily call local embrace local SEO. Interflora in Denmark is a really good example. They’ll never make it into a local pack, but by creating local pages, they’re able to meet both the searcher’s intent of sending flowers and contacting a local florist in the area.
If you compare this to how other websites match a consumer with a local business, such as a website that allows users to order fast food, they often only serve the purpose of picking up the product and do not display the businesses address and phone number.
Of course, this is what the company is most interested in, but in SEO we can see that behavior is becoming more important. By 'forcing' the user's intent instead of offering them all the options, you risk a competitor who wants to match the user's intent gradually taking over your top position.
Tobias Hyldeborg is SEO and Webanalytics Expert at Digital Marketing Agency Quisma in Denmark. He also writes about SEO, Webanalytics and Online Marketing on his own blog and recently published an article about the best local citation sites in Denmark.
Matthew Kay
Head of Operations at Aira
What are your top tips for local SEO in your country/city/region?
Some factors commonly associated with local SEO, like reviews and how close your business is to the searcher, are hard to control — so my best advice is to focus on the things you can control. Sure, you can ask for reviews and do some outreach to try to build some links. While these are part of your strategy, these tactics rely on others doing the work for you. That leaves other areas you can control to give yourself the best chance of showing up in the SERPs.
Ensuring ‘hygiene’ factors like including the name of the city or town you’re targeting in your page copy, meta title, title tags etc. is a must, but it’s also important to make sure you’re optimising your Google My Business (GMB) pages as much as possible.
The most important element of GMB optimization is categorization – if you don’t choose the right categories, you can pretty much forget about showing up for your target phrases. Get those GMB pages verified and make sure to include details like a company description, hours of operation, photos, services, etc. Everything makes a difference, so take the time to include as much information as you can.
Among the things you can check are authoritative and accurate citations. We divide citations into two categories: general and niche.
General citations are generally more reliable – Sites like Yelp are a great example of general citations that can give you more authority than niche directories. Niche citations focus on either a geographic area or a specific topic/topic. Examples include business directories that focus on a specific area, like a city, or an industry, like construction or recruiting.
Citations are a great way to create a steady stream of links to your site with relatively little effort. If you don’t have the resources to do it yourself, I’ve found Whitespark’s citation building service to be extremely valuable and doesn’t break the bank at just a few dollars per citation. Whichever way you go, make sure your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) are consistent across all directories. This goes for Google My Business and beyond, or you may have issues with Google ranking your site in mapped listings!
What tactics do you think are less effective in your country/city/region compared to general recommendations for local SEO?
I think social media is a big failure in this regard - I've rarely seen instances where social media is overly beneficial for rankings other than making sure you get good reviews on some other platforms like Facebook for local SEO - and even that's not a direct correlation to rankings. It's more likely to be the effect of someone seeing the review, visiting the restaurant, and then promoting the restaurant through their own review or referrals.
I’ve seen mixed results for reviews. I think reviews are incredibly important beyond the actual SEO impact. We’ve made an effort to get more reviews for some of our clients, and it hasn’t made a difference for some key terms and phrases. In some cases, we’ve ranked higher than our competitors even when our reviews are in the double digits, despite having no reviews at all. This is something I’d like to test further, but there are so many variables that it’s hard to know how much of an impact reviews really have.
Overall though, the best practice advice for local SEO is pretty solid!
What are some of the best examples of local businesses in your country/city/region that are really doing well in the Local Pack/Finder results?
Of course I’m biased, but our client Just Tyres had their best two months ever in terms of website revenue in the last three months! We’re constantly building links to their site using attributions. They have a slight advantage because they have about 40 local stores, so for every general attribution – that is, a attribution that’s not focused on a geographic area – we can generate more. This is harder for a business with only three or four locations.
Matthew Kay is the Operations Manager of Aira, a digital marketing agency based in Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
Luke Fitzgerald
Head of SEO at Wolfgang Digital
Gustavo Pelogia
SEO Expert at Wolfgang Digital
What are your top tips for local SEO in your country/city/region?
This is a pretty basic topic, but we still see many local businesses in Dublin, Ireland forget the basics. Many large brick-and-mortar retailers ignore simple housekeeping tasks like setting business hours, and a surprising number — over 20% at our last count — have not claimed their own Google My Business profiles. Even if you’re not familiar with SEO, this is a pretty basic topic that most local businesses can understand.