It looks like a complicated matter, and Google's algorithms are hard to understand, but the truth is, there are some pretty sly ways to trick Google into recognizing your business as a popular local entity. When this happens, you get better rankings in search engines so your local customers and everyone else will have no problem finding your business website or your place of business. Check out these simple rank-boosting local SEO tricks to get more from your efforts with online marketing.

1. Geting Coverage for Your Local Business On a High-Indexed Site Is Excellent

Sometimes, you can get your business name to the top of search results simply by having the right media coverage from a company that ranks high on the list because of their size and popularity.  For example, your local newspaper's website probably ranks pretty high in search results because they boast so much traffic and have a substantially sized site naturally beefed up with local SEO terms. Getting your business name in the newspaper and mentioned on their website could work wonders for your local SEO marketing efforts.  Other website entity examples that can help make the same thing happen, include:

  • Local broadcast television stations
  • Associated businesses much larger than your own
  • Well-known community or celebrity personalities

2. Filling In Local Business Profiles Is a Simple Local SEO Trick

Yelp, Google+, The Yellow Pages—there are a ton of these business directory sites where you can supply your company profile, link your website, and help people find your business locally. Yet, so many small business owners disregard the value of these business directory sites even though they are one of the key local SEO tricks to take advantage of. The thing is, the more of these profiles you fill out and link back to your own business site, the more popular your business begins to look in the eyes of Google, which can mean higher search indexes in some cases.

When you fill out these profiles, don't be skimpy with your information. You should:

  • Fully provide contact and address information
  • Fill in descriptions
  • Supply business photos for reference

Do whatever it takes to build full profiles on these directory sites. You will see a massive uptick in how many locals find your website because of your inputs.

3. Make Your Location-Based Pages Unique

Did you know that creating content that is too similar for local service or product pages could negatively impact your search rankings? A lot of small business owners do this thing where they go through the trouble of creating separate pages for certain cities or service areas, but they simply copy/paste content and swap out city names. Unfortunately, Google calls this appreciably similar content and that is something that can drastically depreciate your rankings in search engine results. There are a few issues that make this the case:

1. Search engines will recognize duplicate content and only use one page for results.

or

2.Search engines may not know which to exclude or include from indices so they display none or the wrong ones.

Instead of using repeated text on local pages, make sure every page is uniquely crafted, right down to the text, imagery, and meta tags and titles tacked on to the page.

Even when you think you've done all you can to boost localized SEO marketing efforts, there could definitely be a few more tricks up the proverbial sleeve to pull out. Reach out to Brandgy for more information on local SEO tricks.