Local SEO refers to a marketing exercise that helps local business become easily discoverable online. Rather than catering to a global audience, local optimizations help them promote products and services to customers within a specific geography. This is a much useful approach to small or medium sized businesses who want to improve their visibility on search engine pages when customers in a specific locale search for them. If you are business looking to gain more traction through local SEO services Houston, here are a few tips for you.

Create a local business listing and profile

Creating a search engine business profile is one of the first and foremost steps in local search engine optimization. By claiming a Google My Business profile, your business becomes visible to customers or potential ones every time they search with a specific keyword. To create one, it is necessary that you have a physical presence with a building and street address. To this, you can also add contact information, business hours, holidays, images, and many other details to your business profile page. Alongside search engine business, you also need to set up profiles on local directories and listings. These act as a separate platform for local users to find you.

Set up social media pages

Social media plays a very important role in local SEO. Well-performing social media pages also land up among top search engine results, thus adding to your credibility and visibility. Engaging with customers and local people through daily posts helps you connect better to your targeted audience while also improving your brand recall. This is because followers want to see you as a person rather than another brand with a logo. They appreciate it when you build and nurture relationships with them through interactive posts and comments. They also love it when you share original images and videos that appeal to the local crowd.

Optimize content with local keywords

When your sole purpose is to make your business more visible to a local crowd, it becomes even more important than any on-page or off-page SEO exercise that you carry out reflect the same. To do this, optimize webpage content, titles, meta tags, and descriptions with local keywords. For instance, if you are a wedding company in Houston, add a keyword like ‘wedding planner Houston’ to the title tag. This helps search engines know that you are tied to or want to cater to the locality and hence your website is more likely to show up when a customer searches for those keywords.

Improve local coverage

When catering to a specific geography, it is important that your business, its products or service be covered adequately by the major publications in that area. This is because reputed publishers have a high ranking on search engine result pages and appearing in articles or blogs written by them makes your website more visible to new audiences locally. To do this, maintain a good rapport with local journalists who are willing to cover you from time to time. You could either look to get featured in an exclusive story or engage in a paid association.

Manage your reputation well

Reviews and ratings work like word of mouth marketing on search engine pages. The more positive feedback and high-quality reviews that you have on your search engine business listings or other local directory pages, the more easily your business shows up and the better it ranks on search engine result pages. Every review or star you receive on a page like Google My Business counts and therefore, it is important that you actively manage your online reputation for better local optimization.

Review information from time to time

With so many directories and listings out there, it becomes easy for someone to fill up your business details on a newly launched portal with ease. This, however, may be incomplete or incorrect information, which eventually affect your business. So, from time to time, review your online presence and ensure that all information given is correct and up-to-date. This applies to your search engine business page listings as well.

Finally, remember to analyze your local SEO services efforts continuously and make changes when necessary for better results.