Try these strategies to attain high local rankings in the search engines:

• Consider building a community. Perhaps you're good at bringing people together. You could create a forum or develop your social media presence devoted to your prospective customers' needs. As this community grows, you can then send your audience towards your offers.
• Use a brand-able domain. If you go back a few years, everyone was trying to build their websites on domain names that exactly matched their keywords. This system has worked for a while. You could rank these websites near the top of the search engines with minimal effort.

Nowadays, things have changed, and brand-able domains are the way to go. When you create a brand, you create a unique presence for your business, essential when attempting to rank locally.

Build an intuitive, responsive website. Even with the free web-builder software available today, there are still plenty of local businesses with poor sites. Sometimes it's best to pay for an expert to create a professional website - especially if you want to outrank these more mediocre websites.

A responsive website is essential to ensure that the site works on all devices. These days, most web traffic comes from mobile devices, so you must make your website mobile-friendly in addition to desktops.

Use on-page SEO. If you want to rank highly, it's essential to optimize your website. Ensure that each page on your website is optimized with a title, heading tags, and properly labeled images. Choose keywords that are appropriate for your website.

Forget about trying to rank globally, but instead, look at adding local place names. For example, "restaurants in Chicago" instead of "restaurants."

• Speed up your website loading time. Website loading time is a ranking factor that many website owners fail to address. If your site is slow to load, users will click off it quickly. This high bounce rate will harm your SEO efforts.
• Verify your business with Google My Business. If you want your business to appear on Google Maps, you'll need to verify it with Google My Business. Once you've done this, your business will have a higher chance of appearing on the map on the first-page search results.
• Build local citations. Citations are when your business name, address, and phone number are correctly displayed everywhere on the web. These citations help to boost your visibility on Google Maps and the local search results. The more of these your website has, the better your site should perform.

Be consistent with the wording across all your listings. If you are not uniform, it may harm your overall visibility.

• Earn reviews from customers. Encourage your customers to publish reviews of your products or services. These reviews help build trust in the search engines, plus you will be building confidence in the general public too.

If you aim to succeed at local SEO, you won't need to focus too much on content marketing. When you focus on these local SEO techniques, you can beat those competitors who invest heavily in content.

Using SEO for growth is easy when you're aware of the trends. Keep up with Google's algorithm and the latest SEO trends throughout the year. That way, you can get a step ahead of the competition (and rank ahead of them, too)!

Need help improving your SEO strategy this year? Request a free consultation from our team today!

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