Local search is the most important tool a local business has for attracting visitors and converting them into leads and customers. It’s a topic we’ve noted many times in this newsletter, but it always bears repeating: If you’re not optimizing your efforts for local search, you’re losing out on a crucial edge over your local competitors.

The numbers tell the story: About 3 billion search queries contain local terms every month, 70 percent of online searchers use local search to find offline businesses, and 30% of Google searches are for local information.

Some of these strategies have been noted before, but here’s a quick overview of things you need to consider:

Focus on content: If it seems like we’re always going on about that, well, we are, and we’re not going to stop. You need solid, relevant, original content on your site to maximize your local search potential. It’s an investment that pays off extraordinarily well.

Every new blog post is essentially a new indexed page for your site, a place where you can include a targeted geographic search phrase, and a new opportunity to appear in search results.

Write about other local services relevant to your business and visitors: If you do window installation, write about a local business that provides retail window installation (as long as it’s not a direct competitor, obviously).

This lets you provide helpful content about your geographic area without resorting to dangerous keyword stuffing. It also helps build goodwill with local businesses that can introduce you to new customers, and potential inbound links.

Be sure the five crucial on-page SEO elements are optimized: These means ensuring that your page title, URLs, page headers, internal links, and page content are optimized with keywords. Your Ring Ring Marketing professional can assist you with any questions you have about this.