You know the basics of localized SEO ideas and have done your best to implement them. However, after months of implementing changes, you still see no results or changes in traffic to your site from a localized customer base. Unfortunately, many online business owners miss the mark when it comes to their local SEO strategy because it is a little more complicated than just inserting city names and including contact information. Take a look at these 4 reasons why your local SEO strategy is failing to attract localized customers.

You Failed to Register a Google My Business Account.

This is one of those things that often gets disregarded and online retailers just want to dive right in and start vamping up their local SEO strategy on-site. However, registering your business with Google serves a valuable purpose: It gets you found by people who are actually looking for more localized online retailers. When you register your business account on Google, you will be including the details people want to know, but you will also be making it possible for Google to recognize your business as local when people in your area go online to search for certain things they want.

Your Local SEO Strategy has Blatant Inconsistencies.

If there is one thing you can do to improve local SEO efforts, it is to be consistent.

You want everything linked and connected logically, right down to the name of your website domain, and your business email that is used for customer communications. Sounds simple, but nevertheless, this process can take some doing. You will need to be consistent with components of your online business like:

  • where your business is physically located and how you list this location in your content and business listing
  • how you implement local SEO into your web pages–don't use variant locations mentions that seem unrelated to one another
  • the name of your business on Google listings, your website, and your email address
  • your telephone contact information–insert a local number and a toll-free number for contact purposes on your site

In addition, to stop changes to your profile by data aggregators, you will want to lock down digital information about your company online. This form of “digital information management” is critical for local SEO and for your customers to find you.

You Optimized a Single Site to Attract Business from Multiple Locations.

This mistake also correlates with the consistency issue discussed above.

If you are trying to market to more than one localized area, you cannot simply use one website or page to attract people from every direction on the map. What you should do instead is set up a primary website hub that is generally geared toward everyone, and then take the steps to implement subpages that will work as attractors to garner local interest from specific areas. This is important because a web page that is trying to cover too much geographical SEO will often come across to a visitor as confusing or spammy.

Make sure your site is focused locally. If you are a New Orleans plumber and want to make to other areas nearby (like Metairie for example) make a subsite focused on Metairie customers.

You did not update the title tag or meta description during your web page design efforts.

We see this all the time and it is one of the top reasons why your local SEO strategy is failing.

When optimizing your web page for local SEO purposes, it is an all-out MUST that you also update the title tags and meta descriptions of the page with the name of the LOCATION (city and state) that you are trying to target. Covering this change gives your pages a better chance of showing up when a local customer keys in similar descriptors. For easier access to the title tags and meta descriptions of a page, consider installing the Mozbar toolbar for your web browser.

At the end of the day, a local SEO strategy is an important component of your online marketing endeavors, but it must be implemented the right way to work. If you have been struggling to find ROI with your local SEO efforts, check out our other articles on improving local SEO.