Local SEO Marketing in 2020 – Complete Solution Guide

local seo

local seo

Estimated Reading time 12 min 27 sec – 3,110 words

Local search is the bloodline of all local businesses that want to gain a competitive edge. This year will bring success to millions of local companies if they implement the new and latest techniques. In this guide, I will cover every single part of building your local SEO online presence to be found by the thousands.

Small businesses need to take advantage of this guide because studies show that 9 out of 10 customers use the power of search to find local businesses. The simple truth about it if you’re not among the businesses that are optimized for 2020, then you will miss out.

Search traffic will be your #1 choice of building your business brand, traffic, and revenue growth this year. The key is that the things I will explain can mostly be done free of charge. So your goal for this year is to implement these actions and put your business on the highway to success.

Local SEO Marketing in 2020 - Complete Solution Guide 1Think Mobile 2020

Before jumping into the guide, I wanted to talk a little about mobile searches, and the reason why having your location on is helping your business. Google has gotten so smart about understanding your search patterns to the following things you like, such as…

  • Favorites Food
  • Videos You Like
  • Topics
  • Driving Routes
  • Favorite Resturants
  • and more…

The majority of people have an Android or iPhone these days, so the technology is pretty mind-blowing when you think about it. If your potential clients/customers keep their locations on and stay logged in to their Google accounts, then they are introduced to all the goodies locally.

For Example:

Let us say Coleman BBQ Shaq built their online presence in the city of Shreveport, La, which is a pretty big city in my surrounding area. We set up our utterly optimized website and went to set up our Google Places Page and Bing Places Page.

Not only did we set these platforms up, but we also went the extra mile from ultimately optimizing each platform.

Meaning we did the following…

  • – Added a well written and optimized description short and long
  • – Created tags and keywords that reflected what local people would search for, such as…..Shreveport BBQ, Shreveport Soul Food, Shreveport Resturants, etc…
  • – We added a logo
  • – We added our menu/services
  • – Plus, we added a video, “Hosted on Youtube.”

You see, by adding these items to the Google Places and Bing Places, I’ve just put my 2020 local marketing in front of many local competitors.

After the listing is approved and live in the local searches, then the magic starts to happen. Then what begins to appear on mobile devices is the local searches people are going after. If John and Mary are looking for BBQ places in Shreveport, and they Google those words, your listing will show up around that category.

From here, Google will supply all the results, and if my BBQ is in the top three, then I’m likely to get that business. Now a lot of factors will go into who is placed #1 to #27 but know by merely setting up the listing you’re already ahead of the ball game.

Now you can see with this simple example of how people can find your business online in the SERPs, and the time has come far to understand local SEO in 2020.

 

What The Heck is Local SEO?

Local SEO is nothing more then you optimizing your local listing and website to show up for a descriptive term. SEO is what most of us SEO marketers think of when we want to rank something online is doing what we call SEO.

SEO is more than ranking things nationally or around the world, while local SEO deals with nearby people are searching for what you have to offer.

If you type “Shreveport Restaurants,” you hope to find many types of restaurants in Shreveport. Local SEO is the process of building those listings so that the surrounding people can discover your business. In simple terms, if you have a restaurant in Shreveport and you’re not listed, then you are missing out on tons of customers. If I did the local keyword research, it might show your missing out of hundreds of thousands of businesses each year.

Overall local SEO is all about putting your simple to create a listing in the right category with the right keywords and tags.

 

Quick Local Win’s

In this section, I want to give away what I call my swift wins. These are the things I will do today before even going any further in setting up my online presence. All of these quick wins are based on getting your website structure up to par for Google and friends.

Keep Website Updated – Google has gotten smart in knowing which websites sites are updated or not. The search engines want websites, whether they are local or not. Whatever you do make sure your site is updated, so you won’t be penalized for having an unsafe site.

Complete Website Optimization – What this is based on is optimizing everything on your site from title, tags, meta tags, pages, and more. You need to let Google know what location you want to be found under.

Produce Local Content – One of the best ways to stand out from the crowd is by producing epic-wow local SEO content. If you’re a pet store in Shreveport, then I will encourage you to provide resources and guides for the Shreveport market for pets. Being consistent with your content, Google will start to reward you for serving that local audience.

Internal Linking – Believe it or not, your local content will do you no right unless the links are found. In simple terms, every page your site should link to each other.

For Example: On my website at the bottom of the page, you will find recent content, epic-wow content, and pages. This shows up on every one of my pages, which is suitable for interlinking. Plus, most important, if you’re posting local content, it’s index fast and more comfortable just by having a pure rote to follow of finding links on your site.

Must be Mobile Friendly – Have you heard about the Google Mobile search engine that’s coming. If you haven’t, then get ready because Google understands everyone has phones, so they want them to be served with only mobile-friendly sites. If your site not mobile, please make 2020 that time to structure it for mobile searches.

 

Setup Google PLaces

Google has pretty much-given business owners of brick and mortar a place to highlight our businesses. Google places are the platefrom that millions of people use every day to list their business.

It’s 100%, and when set up correctly, you can get a good bit of online traction online. Here below, I will walk you through the simple and effective way of setting up your Google Places for the first time.

First, you will need to login to your account in Google and go to this link.

Local SEO Marketing in 2020 - Complete Solution Guide 2

From here, everything is self-explanatory in set up your listing by offering them all the information from A to Z. Over the next week or so, you will receive a postcard in the mail for you to verify your location. After that, you will be all good to go, and you will be the proud owner of your very own Google Places listing.

Setup Bing PLaces

One platform I love the most is Bing Places because of how easy it is to use. They had simplified things and made it almost impossible to mess up a listing. With this listing, your business will be shown locally in their search engine for millions to view.

Before that can happen, you must go to this link first.

Local SEO Marketing in 2020 - Complete Solution Guide 3

Naturally, from here, click the button above to get started.

Claim Listing

Next, you will be asked to claim your current listing or enter it manually in the search boxes.

Local SEO Marketing in 2020 - Complete Solution Guide 4

Verification Process

There are few ways you can verify your listing. It can be from a phone or postcards. Depending on specific items, they will only give you a postcard as the only option. Regardless you will be able to get your listing verified and listed online for a potential of millions to see.

a

Steal Competitors Keyword

Local SEO is not a mysterious world where no one can enter except the fortunate 500 companies. In today’s SEO world, things are a lot easier to break down versus ten plus years ago. What I mean due to significant pieces of software such as Ahref, we’re able to dominate any market nationally and locally.

How Is That?

To go back to my example of the BBQ Shaq, I’m opening up in Shreveport La. If I’m looking to gain a piece of that market in the search engines, then I must first know who my competitors are, and most importantly, what they’re rank for in their given market.

What you need to do is plug the lead keyword into Ahref, and see who is ranked #1 for that keyword. Once you find who is #1, it’s time to see which keywords they are rank for, which is easy to find out.

Local SEO Marketing in 2020 - Complete Solution Guide 5

What the first thing you will notice is that this keyword has a monthly search volume of 150 searches per month. Now, this is not at all a lot of searches, but for a BBQ place, it is worth presuming because it’s so targeted in that given market.

Out of these 150 search values, the #1 listing, which is is Yelp page, gets around 132 clicks per month. Again this is not a lot, but it’s, and I don’t know about you if I’m able to get 50 of those people to visit my place of business, then I’m doing good.

Local SEO Marketing in 2020 - Complete Solution Guide 6

Here are the numbers…

50 people at a average of $30 per order = $1,500 per month

Just ranking for that one term, I can see great traction of people coming through the doors.

BUT WAIT:

Remember talking about stealing our competitor’s keywords…..the listing that is number one is also rank for another 12 related terms which I can target my business. With all those keywords together, they have an accumulation of about 300 searches altogether.

Very Awesome

This is the best and most straightforward way to steal local keywords and rankings for any industry. Now you’re able not only to see who the top dog in your market but also the keywords their ranking for from A to Z. Getting the keywords is just half of the battle, but without active backlinks, it will be impossible to get ranked.

a

No Backlink No Rankings

For those of you who are new to local SEO marketing and not too sure what backlinks are, then I’m going to keep it 100% simple. A backlink is a link on one site pointing to another. In simple terms, this is considered a vote by Google to determines it’s ranking potential.

To keep it simple, you need backlinks to move your content and website up the rankings. Below I’m going to give you many places to build these backlinks over time, and before you know it, you’re ranked on the front page.

Below you will find a simple to use website which will supply you with thousands of backlinks for years to come. These links are pretty easy to come by, but somewhat hard to get without any hard efforts.

All you need is Drop My Link.

Local SEO Marketing in 2020 - Complete Solution Guide 7

 

This website is the best free base website online to gain backlinks, whether it’s locally or nationally. Below I’m going to over the top 4 places to get comfortable but challenging backlinks to help your overall rankings.

 

Forums Backlinks

There are little thousands, if not millions of forums online in any niche you can name such as…

  • – Garden
  • – Auto
  • – Sports
  • – Pets
  • – and too many more

Local SEO Marketing in 2020 - Complete Solution Guide 8

The power of forums is to give you a platform to talk about your niche with like-minded people. The other good thing about it is that in your signature at the end of any response you make is a place to create a backlink.

Example: Going back to my BBQ Shaq example you will see I’m trying to get on the front page for the keyword “BBQ Shreveport” So, for this reason, I will create a backlink/signature such as…

Best BBQ Shaq in Shreveport La or Shreveport #1 BBQ Shaq in the City

Even though these manual backlinks are not exact match keywords, they are still targeted. Google is today’s times, doesn’t need exact match keywords to pass on the credit for a keyword. This is the reason why we tell people to write their content and backlinks naturally, and Google will figure it out.

 

Comment Backlinks

Building comments backlinks are the oldest form of manual backlinks online. When you have the opportunity to place a comment on a given website, then do it. It can be a comment around your niche or on sites that are local in the community.

One of the most significant drop back of building comment backlinks is that a lot of them are no following. In other words, on some websites, they may come out to follow links. It all depends on the blogging and comment platform their using.

Either way, building comment backlinks are 100% easy to do, and if you stay consistent, you will start to gain natural links from people reading your comment response, which will result in more traffic to your website.

 

Guest Posts

Sometimes if you don’t have an audience to write for, then why not write for someone else’s audience. Not only that, we are piggybacking off the authority level of their website to gain some link juice to be able to achieve higher rankings. In simple terms, we will need to start doing some guest posting to get our backlink onto their site.

Some sites allow you to have a contextual link in the body of the content, while others only allow a link in the bio section at the end of the article. Finding these gusting posting sites are pretty easy to do just by doing a simple search.

Writing about 3 to 5 high-quality guest posts each month will start moving your website up the rankings for your chosen keyword.

But you are maybe asking what if my niche doesn’t have any local websites that accept guests’ posts. Well, this is simple to solve a solution that comes down to write for any site in your niche. Whether they are locally or nationally, the backlink will still be just as strong.

 

Resources Pages

What are these pages, and why should I care about seeking out these pages? What are the resources pages?

These pages can be nationally and local, so at the end of the day, there are all useful. These pages list many links to local niches, etc…

Example of Resouces Pages: Chamber of Commerce

Every city has a chamber website where you can give a full detail description of your business. My opinion is that this is the best place to start to get your first resource backlink.

But, there are many other places to get a link on a resources page where it’s local or national. Let’s take the example of “real estate.”

I will input the keyword “real estate” and then choose any one of the footprints…..In this example, I’m going to want “links.”

Local SEO Marketing in 2020 - Complete Solution Guide 9

This means the system will give me all the real estate resources that have a “links” page.

Results from the Google Searches

Local SEO Marketing in 2020 - Complete Solution Guide 10

Now all these results are Opportunites to get a link put on their page, but I’m going to click on “Real Estate Links” – Collaborative Law Links.”

Below you will see precisely how a resource page looks like, which contains useful resources. The key is to offer something al value in the real estate industry if this was your niche and see if they are willing to link to it.

Local SEO Marketing in 2020 - Complete Solution Guide 11

Find their contact information on the page, and shoot them an email to see if they’re interested in adding your link to the page. Just that simple…I will be going into useful details of this in an up and coming guide that will break down this process even more.

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My First 100 Citations

Finally, not least, I will love to introduce by far the simplest way to dominate your local market online and stay up to date for the search engines.

Yes…Citations

What Are Citations?

Nothing more than an online listing of your business when it comes to all your information. You’re able to list the following items…

  • Business Name
  • Phone
  • Address
  • Website
  • Email
  • Description
  • Logo
  • Photos
  • Videos
  • and more…

A lot of these are free, so you can sign up for as many as you want to get the best results. The more you sign up for, the better because these show the search engines you have a right online presence. That presence over the local competition is, so I’m when it comes to trust, reviews, and also rankings.

Here is a complete list of citations listed by categories of any niche that’s related to your business. All you have to do is choose the one closest to your niche and start building your profiles. This will surely bring you results when people are searching locally for your niche throughout the search engines.

Local SEO Marketing – Complete Checklist Solution Guide Infographic

Below is an infographic I’ve put together to break down the entire process in simple terms.

Local SEO Marketing in 2020 - Complete Solution Guide 12

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<p style=”text-align: center;”><a href=”https://www.colemanmg.com/local-seo/”><img class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-19952″ src=”https://www.colemanmg.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Local-SEO-Marketing-Complete-Solution-Guide-1.png” alt=”” width=”800″ height=”2000″ />

 

Get a Free Online Presence Report Today

I’m one of those people who love to give back to business by offering them the best free resources possible. So here is a free online presence report of how your business is shaped up online compared to your local competitors.

This report will let you know where you’re rank at this moment in all the top search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Not only that, it will give you the citations you are missing versus the local competitions. You will get a detail report of the backlinks you currently have, and what you need to outrank the local website. You will get tons of more details and more…

Below are a screenshot and PDF example of how your report will look.

Local SEO Marketing in 2020 - Complete Solution Guide 13

View Report

Local SEO Marketing in 2020 - Complete Solution Guide 1If you loved this, please leave a comment below because I will like to hear your point of view of local marketing or just a little information about your business.

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