40 One-Sentence Local SEO Tips

Here are 40 simple local SEO tips that will help you start attracting organic search visits, and sales, from local clients and customers. Most of these tips don’t need any technical know-how. And, each of them will benefit your marketing strategy in more than one way.

Your marketing strategy will start to feel a lift as you focus on improving your SEO.

By the way, I’m right there with you. I’m building Ragon Creative into a digital marketing agency that helps local businesses crush their marketing goals. It’s crucial that you execute a simple, but effective local SEO strategy if you want to get found by local customers on Google.

These 40 quick tips are constantly being tested (and proven true) as we grow our Asheville digital marketing agency:

19 Local SEO Tips to Improve Your Website

1 – Create a specific sales page for each service or product.

2 – Create a specific website page for each location.

3 – Treat your main sales pages as pillar pages that your other website pages link to.

4 – Add an FAQ section to the bottom of your sales pages.

Here’s an example of the FAQ section of our Local SEO Services page.

5 – Keep your pages all within 3 layers deep on your site — more slashes equal lower priority.

6 – Embed a Google Map of your location directly on your contact page.

7 – Use real photos from your business, with smiling faces that welcome new customers and clients.

8 – Embed your related YouTube videos on your site to keep visitors engaged with the content.

9 – Embed related videos or audio files onto your website pages.

10 – Include testimonials and logos from your best clients on your sales pages.

11 – Pick a different focus keyword for each page on your website—this keeps you from competing with yourself.

12 – Link to key pillar pages internally on your site—don’t leave orphan pages hanging out there.

13 – Include your focus keyword phrase in your page title, URL, image tags, meta description, and a few times throughout your subheads and page content.

14 – Compress your images before uploading them to your site, using a tool like Tiny.png.

15 – Include your main service pages (and/or location pages) in your header and footer.

16 – Make sure your website is responsive, and use Google Search Console to find and fix any pages with issues.

Click here to get my FREE 6-day course on Google Search Console.

17 – Host your website on a fast and dependable hosting platform like Flywheel or WP Engine.

18 – Refine your page titles to use natural language that focuses on a different keyword for each page.

19 – Use natural, keyword-focused titles and alt tags on your website images.

3 Local Content Strategies to Get More Organic Traffic (and Trust)

20 – Share a few of your best case studies as articles, especially if they are from well-known clients or customers

21 – Write a couple of bottom-funnel blog posts that are helpful for people in their final stage of buying.

22 – Write an in-depth article that highlights certain areas where your expertise collides with your geographic area.

18 Local SEO Tips That Improve Your Website’s Domain Authority

23 – Join your local Chamber of Commerce to earn a local backlink (not to mention a solid networking connection). For example, here’s a link to the Asheville Chamber of Commerce.

24 – Keep your name, address, and phone number (NAP) consistent in every business profile you create online.

25 – Join a couple of leading organizations in your industry, especially if they include their members in an online database.

26 – Get more Google reviews from your best clients, and make sure to say thanks to everyone.

27 – Add your events to Google Business, Apple Maps, and Facebook to spread out your net, and encourage more natural word-of-mouth (link them back to event info on your site).

28 – Set up your free Google Business profile, and get it verified ASAP (this is your closest connection to Google, so don’t waste it).

Click here to get help optimizing your Google Business profile.

29 – Then, keep it active with a couple of monthly posts, new photos of your business and customers, and any events coming up.

30 – Do the same with a Bing Places profile, to help index new website pages more quickly.

31 – Set up your Apple maps location via Apple Business Connect to encourage customers and clients to visit your physical location (you have to use a public business address).

Here’s a how-to guide for Apple Business Connect.

32 – Don’t add hours to your google business account if you want to receive calls as a 24/7 service (you’ll be marked as “closed now” outside of the hours you pick).

33 – Create a basic Facebook business profile and keep it relatively active (a weekly post is enough from an SEO perspective).

34 – Find a local non-profit related to your business space or personal passion. Then offer to sponsor them (a link on their website is a natural way to build your local domain authority).

35 – In the same way, sponsor a local 5k or community sports event that adds links & logos to their website (it never hurts to support your community).

36 – Speaking of events, why not host a local event or webinar to offer free training (or just something fun/interesting) for your community? It’s a natural way to attract some local press and get more local websites linking to the info on your website.

37 – Set up Google Search Console to help Google’s robots read your website more efficiently. Submit an XML sitemap to highly important pages in the correct order, and a robots.txt file to show Google which ones to ignore.

38 – Find a podcast in your niche and pitch yourself as a guest (especially if it’s a local or regional podcast).

39 – Got a big announcement coming about a new team member, service, or seasonal program? Shoot out a simple, but clearly-written press release to local media outlets (they’ll welcome the fresh content).

40 – Do something big, at least once a year, that captures media attention. I’ll leave the creativity up to you. But, make sure it serves your community, educates potential clients, and shows your real desire to serve your local area.

Small Steps Can Make a Big Impact

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to get more visitors and clients through your local website.

When done well, SEO holds massive potential to grow leads for home services pros, contractors, brick-and-mortar companies, and all types of other local brands. You do, however, need a little direction and a workable plan. These 40 local SEO tips will give you a solid checklist to get started.

Keep it fun. Keep it local.

Keep creating value for your community.