- Google Reviews
This point also straddles the on-page and off-page concept.
You should encourage customers to leave reviews on Google (and obviously also offer a good customer experience).
Reviews explicitly on Google have the most effect for ranking.
Tip: Here’s some advice on getting customers to leave positive reviews.
- Active GMB Management
By generally following the above advice, you’ll be on the way to managing GMB well, but this deserves a special shoutout.
By staying active on GMB – answering questions, responding to reviews, making posts – it seems like you improve factors for ranking.
- Industry-Specific Websites
Make sure you are listed on all the industry-specific websites where people are searching.
For example, if you’re in the hotel industry, you need to be listed on online travel agencies and be integrated as a hotel on Google.
Tip: If you’re unsure if this applies to you, examine several typical ways customer funnels to see what intermediaries there are.
- Over-Reliant on Citations
Even though it’s important to set up the biggest citations, keep in mind: It’s less and less valuable for your entire link profile or local SEO strategy centers on building hundreds of citations across low-value sites.
Tip: The top-tier citations are still important, but spending time creating hundreds of low-quality citations will be a waste.
- GMB Spam
Searching through local Google business listing and reporting competitor spam can help you rank within the local pack by reducing competition.
And you’re actually improving search results for everyone.
Tip: You can also edit or report listings that keyword stuff.
- Competitor Spam
If you’re in a competitive industry, it can be effective to track down and report all spam listings for competitors on any sites and directories.
This includes fake reviews and fake duplicate listings.
- ‘Google Us’
One kind of tricky thing to do is to use other calls to action or marketing to encourage customers to Google the business rather than go directly to the site.
This increases search volume for the business, which is a factor for ranking.
Tip: You can also encourage customers to search for your reviews on Google to increase branded searches.
- Yelp Check-In Offers
Giving customers Check-In Offers on Yelp can improve visibility on Yelp and increase positive reviews, which is one of the most important signals for local SEO.
Tip: Another way to increase Yelp visibility is to encourage satisfied customers to share photos on Yelp.
- YouTube
Do you have any video content? It’s another result that can show up in local search.
Make sure it’s uploaded to YouTube and has good title, description, and keyword optimization.
Tip: You can geotag video and include NAP and website in the description.
In Conclusion
This is a fairly lengthy, comprehensive list of points to look out for in setting up or auditing your local SEO plan.
You don’t need to follow all of them right away, but successful marketers will end up doing most or all of them as they continue optimizing to capture local traffic.