SEO for Local Businesses

You should already know how to optimize your website for SEO, and if you don't, there are a ton of awesome posts online to learn from. When you're working on your optimizations, there are some important elements that you need to concentrate on for Local SEO. These elements are extremely important on your landing pages for your Google Plus Local listings (more commonly known now as "Google My Business Places Plus Local For Business"). If your business has multiple locations, you should have a unique location landing page for each Google Plus Local listing. you're dealing with a single location, then we're talking about your home page - but these elements should also be locally optimized on product and services pages. 

1. City and state in the title tag. Arguably one of the most important places to include city/state information. We've seen many small businesses jump up in local rankings from this alone.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. City and state in content. Clearly, it's important to include your city/state info in your content.
5. City and state in alt tags. We see far too many local business sites that don't even use alt text on their images. Make sure you've got alt text on all your images, and make sure that you're including city/state info in your alt text.

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

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


For more info on how to get ranked higher on google contact SEO Martian,



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