Within the digital landscape, local SEO is perhaps one of the leading drivers of organic traffic to websites of local businesses. This is because of how powerful SEO can be in reaching your audience. However, optimizing your online presence isn't exactly a walk in the park. You're bound to make some mistakes along the way that could hurt your SEO performance. In this guide, we talk about some of the local SEO mistakes most marketers and business owners commit, so that you can avoid them.
1. Not Understand the Ecosystem
The first step in any local SEO campaign is to understand the ecosystem. This is important because it can give you a good idea of how search engines work and how they process data. However, it's easy to let yourself get carried away with trying to understand the technical aspect of it, which can lead to you missing out on the more important things in setting up your campaign.
As such, you have to have a basic understanding of how search engines work and what their priorities are when it comes to ranking local businesses. In the end, it's all about providing relevant and unique content to your audience, which can lead to higher rankings in local searches.
2. Targeting Broad Keywords
In an attempt to rank for a wide array of keywords, local business owners often end up targeting broad keywords that are neither exactly specific nor relevant. This can lead to the content being less relevant and comprehensible, which can, in turn, lead to a negative user experience.
As such, when you're setting up your local SEO campaign, it's critical that you choose keywords that are both specific and relevant. Remember that to be successful in local SEO, you have to put the end user first.
3. Using the Exact Same Description and Business Name
This is a common mistake that many local businesses make, and it can damage your SEO campaign. The issue with using the same description and business name is that it can lead to duplicate content. And duplicate content is one of the issues that negatively affect SEO performance.
When you copy and paste your description and business name, you're essentially creating a duplicate content issue. Duplicate content can be problematic from an SEO perspective because search engines have to determine which version of the content to show to users. This can lead to a negative user experience and spam signals.
4. Not Using Complementary Content
One of the biggest local SEO mistakes is not setting up complementary content. This might seem like an obvious one, but it's easy to let it slip when you're setting up your local SEO campaign.
Complementary content, otherwise known as supplementary content, is additional content that's placed on your website to provide relevant information about your business. This can include things like hours of operation, maps, contact details, photos, menus, and policies. All of these are examples of complementary content that can help users decide whether or not to set foot in your store.
5. Not Crawling Your Site
Crawling your site is important because it can help ensure that your website is as optimized as possible. When you crawl your website, you can identify potentially problematic pages that can cause your site to not rank or even get penalized by search engines. It's also important to note that search engines consider a website to be low quality if it's not crawled and updated on a regular basis.
The best way to crawl your site is through the use of an internal link analysis tool. This can help you identify problematic pages in your site and find pages that are linked to but not linked back. It can also help you find orphaned pages, which is a problem because it can lead to duplicate content issues. Internal linking is also an excellent way to determine whether your content is being linked to other pages on your site.
Conclusion
Local search is still a huge opportunity for businesses that are yet to capitalize on it. With almost everyone using search engines to find what they need, it's easy to see how local search can be very powerful in reaching the right audience. Remember to avoid these mistakes so you can be sure that you're making the most out of local SEO.
If you want to perform well in the search result rankings, you'll need a tool to help you figure out how to best optimize your website. LionRank is a DIY SEO tool that crawls your entire site for issues. It's designed to suggest simple, easy-to-follow tasks with guides specific to your website style. By leveraging this tool, you can make your digital presence significantly more effective than ever before. Contact us today to learn more about LionRank.
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