SEO News

What is local SEO?

Local SEO has grown significantly over the last few years, particularly given the rise of smartphone usage and better connectivity while out and about. Although it has a lot of similarities with organic SEO, it’s ultimately very different.

Local SEO is focused on providing results that are relevant to a searcher based on their current location. If I search for ‘best steak restaurant’ on my desktop right now, Google would provide me with results that are nearest to me.

Similar results are delivered if I search on my smartphone.

In 2011, it was revealed that over 40% of mobile queries have local intent. According to Fresh Egg in 2013, four out of five people use smartphones to look up local information. Two in three people take direct action as a result and one in three people went on to make a purchase.

Google has also recently indicated that one in three US mobile queries is now ‘local’ and 87% of people use their phone when on the go. Google also found that 95% of mobile users look up local information on their phones and the primary functions are calling or visiting a business.

In order for Google and other search engines to serve users with the most relevant information using the vast amount of data they have on us, local based results will become more and more prevalent.

What can you do to optimise for local search?

Here are a few tips to make your website more local friendly.

Google Places for Business

This is the very first thing you should do. 

Claim your Google Places for Business page and make sure your contact information, opening hours, address and contact details are complete. In fact make sure the entire profile is fully complete. 

Providing category information about your site gives Google a better understanding of the topic of your business and creates a signal that you are related to any localised searches about what your business does.

This will be the easiest way for your business to show up in search and maps.

Google+ Local

You will then need to link your Google Places page to a Google+ Local page. This page is more focused on social interaction. It can feature reviews, information about the restaurant, images and posts, plus users will be able to access images, videos and comments. 

Google Local results dominate so much that you have to scroll a long way down to find any others. If customers search directly through maps, the Local listings are even more dominant. 

When creating a Google+ Local page ensure you do the following:

1. Optimise the information copy about the business by referencing keywords

The page’s title should include the brand name, the keyword being targeted and the location. This should be possible to achieve without making either page or meta description come across as unnatural, as the objective remains to optimise for both users and search engines.

2. Reference your keywords in the title 

Don’t forget to include ‘restaurant’ if that is indeed your business. 

3. Make sure that you associate your listing with the right category

‘Chinese restaurants’ could be the most relevant category, rather than just ‘restaurants’. 

4. Schema markup

Add rich media to provide a more enticing proposition to potential customers. 

Here’s a detailed guide on how to use Schema markup. 

5. Add your address in a consistent format with wherever else you’ve mentioned it 

NAP (name, address, phone number) citations are a key ranking factor in local SEO. NAP citations from relevant and authoritative websites provide more value, just like with links.

Clearly stating NAP information will work as a significant signal that you are a business related to a location, which will improve your visibility.

6. Encourage customers to leave reviews

Reviews are arguably the biggest local SEO ranking factor and are often compared to links in organic SEO. 

Listings with reviews also stand out, so encouraging your customers to leave their opinions will increase your chances of success – if those opinions are positive, of course. SEO can’t help you if your food sucks.

7. Create a listing for each of your physical locations

This will ensure that people have the correct details for the nearest branch when searching locally and will give businesses more opportunities to increase rankings. 

You can also optimise the pages on your website to appear more visible in local search…

On-page local SEO


When you’re optimising local pages on your website, it’s important to include the address (in a consistent format) on the page and also the location within the content as well as the page’s title tag. 


The page’s title tag should feature the brand name, the keyword being targeted and the location. You should also think about this with the meta description of the page. 

If you only have one address, you could also include it within your footer as an additional reference. 

Embedding a map on your ‘contact us’ page or local place pages can help local SEO rankings too, as it further illustrates where the business is located.

For more on local SEO from the blog check out these posts from Graham Charlton: Local SEO tips on improving visibility and best practice dos and don’ts.

Posted by Aleyda

One of the most important activities for any SEO process is the initial competitive analysis. This process should correctly identify your SEO targets and provide fundamental input to establish your overall strategy.

Depending on the type, industry, and scope of the SEO process, this analysis can become quite complex, as there are many factors to take into consideration—more now than ever before.

In order to facilitate this process (and make it easy to replicate, control, and document), I’ve created a
step-by-step workflow with the different activities and factors to take into consideration, including identifying SEO competitors, gathering the potential keywords to target, assessing their level of difficulty, and selecting them based on defined criteria:

If you prefer, you can also grab a
higher resolution version of the workflow from here.

The four analysis phases

As you can see, the SEO analysis workflow is divided into four phases:

1. Identify your potential SEO competitors

This initial phase is especially helpful if you’re starting with an SEO process for a new client or industry that you don’t know anything about, and you need to start from scratch to identify all of the potentially relevant competitors.

It’s important to note that these are not necessarily limited to companies or websites that offer the same type of content, services, or products that you do, but can be any website that competes with you in the search results for your target keywords.

2. Validate your SEO competitors

Once you have the potential competitors that you have gathered from different relevant sources it’s time to validate them, by analyzing and filtering which of those are really already ranking, and to which degree, for the same keywords that you’re targeting.

Additionally, at this stage you’ll also expand your list of potential target keywords by performing keyword research. This should use sources beyond the ones that you had already identified coming from your competitors and your current organic search data—sources for which your competitors or yourself are still not ranking, that might represent new opportunities.

3. Compare with your SEO competitors

Now that you have your SEO competitors and potential target keywords, you can gather, list, and compare your site to your competitors, using all of the relevant data to select and prioritize those keywords. This will likely include keyword relevance, current rankings, search volume, ranked pages, as well as domains’ link popularity, content optimization, and page results characteristics, among others.

4. Select your target keywords

It’s finally time to analyze the previously gathered data for your own site and your competitors, using the specified criteria to select the best keyword to target for your own situation in the short-, mid-, and long-term during your SEO process: Those with the highest relevance, search volume, and profitability. The best starting point is in rankings where you are competitive from a popularity and content standpoint.

Tools & data sources

The data sources and tools—besides the traditional ones from search engines, like their keyword or webmaster tools—that can help you to implement the process (some of them mentioned in the workflow) are:

• To identify competitors: Alexa Top Sites, SimilarWeb Websites Ranking & Sites Profile.
• To identify keywords: SEMRush for keyword data, SuggestMtrx (you can also use Ubersuggest or SEOchat Suggestion Keyword Finder) to gather Google suggestions for your keywords.
• To identify rankings: Authority labs, Positionly, Advanced Web Ranking, among others.
• To identify popularity: The Moz SEO Toolbar SERP overlay view, OpenSiteExplorer, CognitiveSEO Backlink Explorer and MajesticSEO for link related data and easy to develop popularity analysis.
• To identify page optimization: Moz On-Page Grader, SEOchat’s Page Comparison tool and Web page SEO analysis tool for a quick on page content optimization analysis.
• To semi-automatize the process: There are tools that have already automatized some of the phases in the process that can help you to advance faster: Moz Keyword Difficulty and SERPs analysis tool, SERPIQ, SEMRush Keyword Difficulty Tool.

Hopefully with these resources you’ll be able to develop more and better SEO competitive analysis!

What other aspects do you take into consideration and which other tools do you? I look forward to hear about them in the comments.

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