Local SEO: what are the optimization criteria?

Local commerce and proximity services are on the rise. In fact, 25% of Google searches have a local intent, and 85% of internet users have already searched for nearby businesses on search engines. Local searches are precise and express immediate, geolocated needs. In other words, optimizing your company’s local SEO is essential if you want to grow your web visibility within your geographic area. But working on your local SEO requires paying attention to a few key points.

What is local SEO?

Local SEO is a strategy for optimizing your online properties (website, Google My Business listing, social media, etc.) that helps grow your company’s visibility on local searches.

In other words, local SEO lets you grow your company’s online visibility within your geographic area. It’s a set of SEO techniques that will improve your ranking on the SERPs for a query with local intent.

Why does local SEO matter?

Local SEO is your best ally if the customers you’re targeting are located in your city or your region. Whether you offer products or services, you have every reason to develop your local SEO. Since internet users’ queries are more and more targeted, you risk falling through the cracks if you fail to meet certain requirements… which we’re going to review in this article!

The on-site elements you shouldn’t overlook

Optimizing your on-site local SEO means making sure your website works properly. Title, meta description, internal linking, and your site’s mobile compatibility are the points you should target first. Here’s why.

Optimize your title and your meta description

Meta tags are an important component of organic search. In particular, they help you improve your ranking on the SERPs. While more than a hundred of these tags exist, two of them should catch your attention when you want to work on your local SEO: the title tag and the meta description tag.

The title tag indicates the title of your page. It’s a very important signal for Google, which uses this tag to determine whether a page matches the user’s search.

The meta description tag, on the other hand, has no major influence on Google’s algorithms. However, it plays an important role in your page’s organic search performance. This short description of your page’s content will, if it’s relevant, encourage users to visit your site.

So don’t forget to indicate your location in your title and meta description tags (e.g. “digital marketing agency Lyon”) to increase your chances of drawing in users when they perform a local search.

Good to know

Semji lets you view the results pages for many countries. The platform gives you visibility into the titles and tags used by your competitors. Use it freely when creating your title and meta description tags!

Work on your internal linking

Internal linking consists of connecting the pages of your site to one another in an orderly way. In other words, you create internal links (ideally on strategic keywords for your page). Deploying an internal linking strategy will strengthen your local SEO strategy. Internal links help you build the authority of your pages, and therefore actively contribute to their ranking. Make sure your internal linking is geared toward local SEO, and therefore directed to the page or pages you want to optimize.

Reminder: The strengths of internal linking

• It makes navigating your site easier,
• It makes your site more understandable to Google,
• It enables the transfer of domain authority between your pages.

Build a “mobile friendly” site

Having a mobile-compatible site is essential if you want to carry out your SEO strategy successfully. “60% of local searches are performed from a smartphone.” In the context of a local search, the small screen is therefore an important source of traffic for your business, since it’s naturally tied to mobility. Above all, don’t neglect it! Especially since voice search on mobile is booming: it’s increasingly used to find nearby businesses. So make sure your site is readable from a smartphone, in other words, that it’s “mobile-friendly.” This will spare you Google’s wrath (and that of its Mobile First algorithm, which since 2015 has penalized sites that aren’t smartphone-compatible) and a decline in your SERP ranking.

Use Hn tags

Hn tags let you structure your page’s content hierarchically and therefore be better understood by search engines. There are 6 of these Hn tags, with H1 representing the most important level and H6 the least important.

These HTML markers impact your SEO and therefore your local SEO, since they contribute to the semantic cohesion of your various pages. As a result, they’ll help you improve your bounce rate and increase the time visitors spend on your site.

A solution like Semji can be very useful for structuring, in just a few clicks, a content outline that’s relevant for your audience and for Google. To learn more, request a personalized demo right now!

Use Schema Markups

Schema markup (also called “structured data”) is a language created by Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Think of it as an additional tool for improving your local SEO. This markup allows search engines to better understand your site. It therefore increases your chances of seeing your site appear in the rich snippets of Google’s answer engine.

Just like Hn tags, you’ll find thousands of schema tags. The one you should prioritize is the “Local Business” schema tag.

Off-site: the role of external links in local search

Working on your off-site local SEO means focusing on the elements external to your website. In this section, we’re going to cover the off-site essentials for effective local SEO.

Set up your Google My Business listing

Google My Business is the starting point of your off-site local SEO strategy. This online directory developed by Google gives you the ability to create your own listing, providing various pieces of information about your business: company name, hours, photos, website, description, address, etc. This page is also located on Google Maps, which makes it all the more valuable for your local SEO strategy.

Google evaluates businesses on the following 3 criteria:

– The relevance between the business and the user’s query,

– The distance separating the business from the location where the search is performed,

– The popularity of the business.

You should therefore see Google My Business as a great way to present yourself on the search engine. Be careful, though: filling out this listing won’t be enough to earn you better positions in Google’s SERP. It’s important to use semantics adapted to your target audience as well as to your industry. Optimize and update your Google My Business page as you would your website, and you’ll put all the odds in your favor!

Don’t underestimate the importance of customer reviews & local directories

A study by Bright Local reports that “the best-ranked businesses are the ones with the most reviews.”

While your Google My Business listing can already bring you a certain number of reviews, online review platforms and local directories are formidable allies for your local SEO strategy (provided you have a website).

Think of review sites as a lever for boosting your popularity. First, with Google, which more readily places its trust in sites that people talk about on the web, but also with your potential customers.

And the stakes are high. According to a study by Econsultancy, 70% of internet users take customer reviews into account. Reviews, whether negative or positive, therefore play a leading role both in your ranking on Google’s SERP and in the customer journey.

So encourage your customers to leave their reviews and, above all, make sure you always respond to them, whether on your site, your Google My Business page, or third-party review sites and local directories such as Les Pages Jaunes, Yelp, or TripAdvisor.

NB: It’s strongly discouraged to resort to fake reviews to polish your image (or to damage a competitor’s).

Keep an eye on your backlinks

A backlink, or inbound link to a web page, is a link that “points” to that page. To better grasp this concept, imagine a page A containing a hyperlink that, when you click on it, redirects you to a page B.

There are 2 ways to obtain backlinks:

• Naturally,

• As part of an SEO strategy.

A backlink is described as “natural” when a user decides to talk about you spontaneously by pointing one of their pages to one of yours.

Backlinks obtained as part of a link-building strategy, on the other hand, come from pages with high PageRank or TrustFlow: the inbound links are therefore high quality.

The key is to obtain quality backlinks in order to increase the popularity and visibility of the web page in question. That way, you’ll have real authority within your territory. Regularly check the status and presence of these links, which can be gained and lost naturally.

Take care of your social media!

Just like your Google My Business page, your social media accounts should be cherished. They’ll be an additional asset in your local SEO strategy. They’ll help you increase your visibility but, above all, engage your community.

Make sure you:

• Target the social networks your audience uses,

• Choose the networks that are also suited to your business,

• Publish quality content (i.e. relevant and engaging),

• Adopt an acquisition strategy.

A well-configured Google My Business listing with plenty of reviews will have a better chance of ranking well on Google Maps. Your LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook pages, on the other hand, won’t boost your ranking on Google’s SERP. However, they can help you gain recognition! So don’t set them aside.

By applying these various tips, your local-scale SEO will be far better than your competitors’.

Next step? Request a demo of our Semji platform to be sure you’re producing 100% high-performing content 😉!