How to optimize WordPress for local SEO?

Nowadays, Google is the place where most people go to find what they are looking for. That’s why it’s becoming increasingly important for any physical or digital business to know what local SEO is and how to optimize it for your brand.

Whether it’s to find a hairdresser, a restaurant or a nursery for your children.

That is why it is increasingly important to have a good SEO positioning at a local level, especially for small businesses that cannot make large investments in marketing. So that when someone searches for your services in your geographical area they can find you.

If you get a good position on Google for a service with a good number of searches, it is likely that potential customers will end up contacting you on a recurring basis.

What is local SEO?

Local SEO is a set of techniques aimed at improving the positioning of a business in Google search results for a specific geographical area.

That is, if we have in furniture store in Ponferrada we would love to appear the first when someone wants to decorate their house and search on Google “buy furniture in Ponferrada”.

But not only for searches that contain the keyword of our city is local SEO worth it. Google, in its infinite wisdom, will show you in many cases, all those that usually have to do with physical businesses, brands that are in your area, whether you write the city or not. Understanding that if you are looking for a gym and you are in León (yes, Google knows this), you are not going to leave until Cuenca.

Thanks to Google, therefore, nowadays we can search for this type of physical businesses and receive recommendations from the closest or with the best reputation, to later go visit them in person.

Yes, we know that there are other search engines that are not Google. But not all caviars are equally good, right?

Why is it important to work on local SEO?

Having a good SEO positioning at a local level is key if you have a physical business or most of your customers come from a specific geographical area because:

• It will help you to appear in a higher position in the Google ranking and therefore have more visibility in your area of activity. Which means greater brand recognition, more visits to the store and higher revenue. Think that the top 5 positions of Google search results get about 70% of users’ clicks.
  30% of all searches on mobile devices are related to location and most people end up visiting the businesses they find in the same day.
• It’s free of charge. Unlike a SEM strategy (ads to appear in the first positions), local SEO is free (not counting the work that goes behind of course). If you use keywords, attractive copy, attention-grabbing images and positive reviews, your brand recognition will skyrocket without having to constantly invest money to appear in ads.
• Increase in income. All of the above translates into more users finding you. And, if you have a good strategy and a good website where you can convert them into customers, your business’ revenue will increase.

Have we convinced you of its importance? We hope so.

Now let’s go with the practical part so that your strategy is the most appropriate and simple possible.

How does local SEO work?

We are going to look at a series of practices with the aim of you learning how to optimize your WordPress site for local SEO.

Some have directly to do with the work that is done on a website or its contents. Others don’t, but they are key to creating a global strategy that helps you position your website in the geographical area that interests you.

Set up your Google My Business card

If what you want is to improve the ranking of your business in the search engines and also appear in the top three positions, it is key to customize the Google My Business card.

Thus, if you search directly for the name of your business, you will not only appear in the normal search results but also in the right bar as a featured business with all your information for customers.

Keep in mind when you are creating your profile:

• Use primary and local keywords since this way you will be able to get a location in local searches.
• Set the category that best represents your business.
• Update any changes that are made in your business (schedule, phone, website …), this way you will avoid that your customers have incorrect information.
• It incorporates attractive images. You know that things come in through the eyes.
• Respond to the reviews that your customers leave you. Be they positive or negative.

Signing up for Google My Business will also help you get listed on Google Maps as a business, which is another way to work on SEO at a local level.

Ask your customers to leave reviews

Most potential customers are the first thing you look at. We are in a context in which the opinion and experience of others are key to making decisions.

A positive recommendation or review will make you gain a lot of ground and make a difference with the main competitors.

It’s important to have them on multiple channels, not just on Google My Business. For example, on the website or on social networks. In this way, the potential customer will decide whether he trusts your business or not and therefore comes to you for service.

Here’s a tip: you can take advantage of if users have left their data to send an email asking them for their experience. You can use Mailchimp or Sendinblue.

Generate local content on your website

For example, are you from Ponferrada? Well, it indicates that “you offer the best hairdressing services in Ponferrada”.

It would be perfect if in the home you specify who you are, what you do and where you are. When Google robots crawl the website, it will index it for the most relevant searches.

Use local keywords

Use tags related to the place where you offer the services. In the title, in the header and in the meta descriptions of the website. In this way, as we said before, Google will crawl and index you for the searches most related to your keywords.

Everything that is adding related keywords and locations will mean a better position in the search engine ranking at the local level.

Keep an eye on this if you have a business for which you are interested in ranking both locally and globally. Since your location may not be relevant to many of your customers.

Instala un plugin SEO para tu web

If your SEO experience is minimal, you can use one of these SEO plugins for WordPress (Yoast, Rank Math, All in One, etc…) to help you in the process and make the tasks much simpler.

These plugins will guide you on the way to optimizing your WordPress pages and posts to improve your positioning, in addition to taking care of many of the technical tasks such as the inclusion of meta tags or the creation of a sitemap for the web.

WordPress plugins for Local SEO

In addition, there are a number of specific WordPress plugins to work with local SEO and that can work perfectly with the generic plugins that we have mentioned above.

Let’s see some of them:

Five Star Business Profile and Schema

It is a plugin that allows you to add structured data to any page or entry on the website. But what really matters to us in this article, is that it facilitates the creation of a contact card to add all the details of the business from that structured data.

You might be wondering what structured data is, right? When we refer to them, we are talking about an organizational structure that provides information to search engines in order for them to know what topic the web is about.

Local Business Schema Lite

This plugin is similar to the previous one, since it allows you to incorporate correctly structured data into the Google My Business card. Information such as the name of the business, the address of the premises, optimized images, the city in which it is located, the postal code, the telephone number and the URL. All this without having to learn how to modify the card.

WP Go Maps

This plugin will allow you to incorporate a Google map with your location, and robots will be able to track it to acquire information that can be used in your favor.

However, beyond the benefits in the local SEO strategy, it should also be taken into account that it will allow potential customers to find you more easily and in this way you can promote your business much more easily.

Adapt your website to mobile (responsive)

Most of the users access your website through mobile. Even more so those who are looking for a solution around them to get a haircut, buy some flowers or join a gym.

If your site is not adapted, you will not only lose customers, but also Google will penalize you in your SEO strategy.

Optimiza el rendimiento de tu web

It is important that your website is well optimized. If it takes more than 2 seconds to load, forget about potential customers and Google’s approval.

How can you tell if your website is fast? Well, with any web performance analysis tool. For example, Lighthouse.

The algorithm will take this into account and will penalize you considerably. All of the above will be useless if your website is not performing well, keep that in mind.

To do this, avoid overloading the homepage, optimize the weight and size of your images, do not abuse multimedia content, disable plugins that you do not use, reduce the use of animations, etc.

Conclusion

If you have a physical business and you want to be the king of your area of action, in addition to differentiating yourself considerably from the competitors in your area, it is vital to work on a good local SEO strategy.

To do this, we hope that the tips we have discussed in this post will help you. And if you put them into practice, your business will start to benefit from them.