Everybody Needs Local SEO - Moz

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may notalways reflect the views of Moz.

If you work in the SEO industry, you need to understand how to do Local SEO. Seriously.. I'm notkidding here... If you're sitting there thinking "Um, no... not really" - then you're exactly the personI'm writing this post for.

If you haven't already, I can pretty much guarantee you that at some point in your SEO career,you're going to do some SEO for a business that has a physical storefront. BOOM - that means LocalSEO. Sure, you've still got to do all the traditional SEO things that you do every day for all yourclients, but when you're talking about a physical location, Local SEO is absolutely necessary.

If you're thinking "But Greg - If I do all the SEO stuff I'm supposed to do, I'll still get the site to rankorganically..." - you still aren't getting it. If you add some Local SEO to the mix, you can show up inorganic results AND the map pack (clients love that, so you should too). Plus, showing up in themap pack or the Local Carousel is incredibly important when a business is trying to pull incustomers from the immediate area. Also, the map pack results show up ABOVE the organic resultson mobile, and we all know that mobile is blowing up.

So if you've never paid any attention to Local SEO, it's time to start lifting, bro. I'm going to give youa simple workout plan to help you beef up your Local SEO muscles, and with a little practice, you'llbe playing with the big boys in no time.

You should already know how to optimize a website, and if you don't, there are a ton of awesome

posts here on Moz. When you're working on your optimizations, there are some important elementsthat you need to concentrate on for Local SEO. These elements are extremely important on yourlanding pages for your Google Plus Local listings (more commonly known now as "Google MyBusiness Places Plus Local For Business"). If your business has multiple locations, you should havea unique location landing page for each Google Plus Local listing. you're dealing with a singlelocation, then we're talking about your home page - but these elements should also be locallyoptimized on product and services pages.Â

City and state in the title tag. Arguably one of the most important places to include city/stateinformation. We've seen many small businesses jump up in local rankings from this alone.

City and state in H1 heading. Hold on, don't interrupt. I know it doesn't HAVE to be an H1 heading...So whatever heading you've got on the page, it's important to also have your city/state info included.

City and state in URL. Obviously, this can't happen on your home page, but on other pages,including the city/state info in the URL can be a powerful signal of local relevance.

City and state in content. Clearly, it's important to include your city/state info in your content.

City and state in alt tags. We see far too many local business sites that don't even use alt text ontheir images. Make sure you've got alt text on all your images, and make sure that you're includingcity/state info in your alt text.

City and state in meta description. Yes, we all know that the meta description doesn't play into theranking algorithm... but including city/state info can really boost clickthrough rate for local searchresults.

Include an embedded Google Map. Including an embedded Google Map is important too, butPLEASE make sure you do it correctly. You don't want to just embed a map that points to youraddress... You want to embed a map that points to your actual Google Plus Local listing.

Most of the Local SEOs who really live and breathe local agree that citations aren't the amazingpowerful weapon that they used to be... but that doesn't mean they're not still incredibly important.If you don't know what a citation is, it's commonly referred to as NAP information in Local SEOcircles - Name, Address, and Phone number. Google expects local businesses to have their NAPinformation on certain other websites (Yelp, social media sites, etc.), so if you don't have citations onthe important sites, or your citation information is incorrect, it can really hurt how your business isranking.

While they're not the silver bullet for rankings that they used to be, they're still an important signal

for local relevancy. Here's may favorite example... We were hired to do the SEO for a car dealershipjust outside of New Orleans last fall. The dealer spent tons of money on radio and TV ads and wasvery well known in the local area, but he didn't understand why he wasn't showing up in localsearches.

Within about 30 seconds of looking at his site, we knew exactly what the problem was. The correctspelling of his dealership name is "Deal'N Doug's Autoplex" - but he had his own business namemisspelled five different ways on his home page alone:

Dean'N Dougs Autoplex

Deal' N Doug's Autoplex

Deal'N Doug's Auto Plex

Dealn Dougs Autoplex

Deal n Dougs Autoplex

We did a quick citation evaluation, and sure enough, he had all of those misspelled names floatingaround in different citations. He also had several citations for "Dealin' Doug's Autoplex" - which isgrammatically how you'd expect it to be spelled.

We figured that we had the perfect opportunity for a citation experiment. All we did during the firstmonth of work was NAP cleanup. We corrected the business name everywhere on his site, and wemade sure to manually update all of the citations that were misspelled.

In just a few weeks, he went from not ranking at all to ranking in the top spot in the map pack. Whenthe local algorithm went through the big shakeup last October, he retained the #1 map ranking and

also gained a #2 organic spot. Yes, we did a lot more optimization for him after that first month, butcleaning up the name information was enough to get him to rank #1 in his city.

Working on citations can be tedious, but it's well worth the effort. There are tons of submissionservices out there, but we prefer to do everything manually, so we know 100% for sure that thingsare done correctly. Here's our citation campaign workflow:

Run an initial check with Moz Local. No, I wasn't paid to say that (but if Moz wants to hook me upwith some extra bacon at MozCon to thank me, I wouldn't turn it down... cough, cough). We startwith a quick check on Moz Local to see the current status of a client's citations. It's a great way tosee a brief overview of how their NAP information is distributed online.

Fix any issues found in Moz Local. It's got all those handy links, why not use them? If there aremissing citations, go get them. If you've got incomplete listings, follow the tips to update them.

Run a citation search with Whitespark. Whitespark's Local Citation Finder is awesome (it's ourfavorite citation tool). You need to run two reports: one to check your current citations, and anotherto find citation opportunities. Whitespark is simply the best around for finding citation opportunities.

Set up a campaign in BrightLocal. Yes, it's a bit redundant to use BrightLocal and Whitespark atthe same time... but we really love their interface. You get 3 tabs of info: active citations, pendingcitations, and potential citations. On each citation, you can enter specific notes, which really helpsyou keep track of your efforts over time. When you add in new citations from your Whitespark list,you can add them in to your "pending citations" tab. When you re-run the report later, any pendingcitations that have become active will move over into the active list.

Keep pumping reps. Over time, you'll add more citations, but you should always use Whitespark tocheck for new opportunities AND any incorrect NAP info that might appear. Keep your notes inBrightLocal so you can keep everything straight.

Reviews are an integral part of Local SEO, but they're also vital for local clickthroughs. Now thatGoogle displays reviews in an isolated popup (instead of taking you to the locations Google PlusLocal page), users will read your reviews before they see any other information about your business.

Our process is simple, but it works well. Here's how to get more positive reviews for any business:

Set up a review page on your site. We always set up a page at domain.com/reviews for every client.It's easy for any employees to remember, and it's a simple URL to tell customers about. You don'twant to ask for reviews and then expect that your customers will be able to search for you onGoogle, navigate to your Google Plus Local page, and find the right link to click to leave a review.

Include simple instructions for leaving a review on the page, along with a direct link to the location'sGoogle Plus Local page. It's also helpful to let customers know that they'll need a Google accountto leave a review (and instructions for setting up a Google account if they don't have one). Youshould always focus on Google reviews until a business gets at least 10 reviews. Once you've got 10reviews on Google, you can offer other options and let customers choose the review site that they'remost comfortable with.

PRO TIP: For Google reviews, include this string at the end of your Google Plus Local link:Â ?hl=en&review=1

Now, when customers click the link, the review window will automatically pop up when they land onyour Google Plus Local page (so they don't have to find the link!).

Create a review handout. There are several review handout generators out there online, but in ourexperience, most of them are a bit too complicated. Instead of showing a flowchart on the handoutor giving customers several options for review sites, our review handouts simply point customers tothe domain.com/reviews page that we set up.Â

This allows us to create a really nice branded postcard to hand out, and regardless of our reviewstrategy, the card never changes.Â

Hand the card to every customer and ASK. You can't just hand the card over, you have to ask yourcustomers to leave reviews. We encourage our clients to hand over the card at the last possiblemoment of customer interaction, so the request and the card are fresh on a customer's mind whenthey leave. Don't offer an incentives to leave reviews, just be honest and let your customers knowthat you'd truly like to hear their honest opinion about their experience

Even if your client has a ton of customers, make sure they understand that they won't get a lot ofreviews. We tell our clients that 1 review a month is a perfectly acceptable pace. A steady stream ofreviews over time is much more important than a quick influx.

There you have it! If you follow these simply Local SEO workout tips, you'll build your Local SEOmuscle in no time. You'll be able to provide better results to your clients, which means they'll behappier... and happier clients means more long-term business. Everyone wins!

About Greg_Gifford -- I read "Internet Marketing for Dummies" (ok, I skimmed it) and thought SEOwould be a fun gig... All kidding aside, I'm a Local SEO geek... I work for an automotive softwarecompany, and my department provides hyper-local SEO and managed social media to car dealers allover the country. I also do quite a bit of freelancing in my free time for other industries. I'm a giantmovie nerd, and probably have an obscure movie quote for just about any situation. I'm also a bigfoodie, so find me at the next SEO conference and I'll take you to the most amazeballs restaurants intown.

http://moz.com/blog/everybody-needs-local-seo