On-Page Optimization for Local SEO

When thinking of local SEO, Google My Business profile is the first thing that will come to the minds of most SEO specialists. While being listed in Google is extremely important, optimizing our website to rank high for local searches is also crucial. On-page local SEO doesn’t only help improve our ranking in the Local Pack. It also boosts our visibility in organic search results.

Here are some of the best tactics we can use on our website to improve its ranking for local searches:

Create a contact page

If we run a local business where we want customers to visit us, we should set up a detailed contact page on our website. Make sure it displays complete and correct NAP information. NAP includes Name, Address, and Phone. At the same time, also make sure that the information is up-to-date and consistent with the data we provided in our Google My Business profile and other listings. Make sure the phone number is clickable for mobile users. If our business owns multiple locations, make sure to include all these locations, with the address and phone number on the contact page.

Other than the basic information, we can also provide our email address, social media profiles, operating hours, and anything else we want our customers to know. Most businesses also embed Google Maps to make it easier for customers to find them.

Besides the contact page, our business’s NAP information should also appear in the site-wide footer on our website.

Create and optimize local landing pages

If we operate in multiple locations, set up a dedicated landing page for each location. The URLs for each of these landing pages will look something like this:

• businessname.com/location-1/

• businessname.com/location-2/

• businessname.com/location-3/

Having dedicated local landing pages can help us optimize these pages for the targeted keywords for these regions and rank higher for relevant searches in each of these locations.

Now we can apply the same on-page SEO tactics on each of these pages, optimizing them for the right keywords. Suppose we offer catering services in Boston, Cambridge, and Waltham. We can optimize our website’s Boston landing page for the keyword catering services in Boston, Cambridge landing page for catering services in Cambridge and so on.

We don’t need to stuff the pages with the exact keyword everywhere. But do make sure we include our business type and location at the key locations on the page: page URL, meta description, title tag, H1 tags, and content.

Local business schema

Schema.org has a dedicated category for local businesses. Setting up a Schema markup for our website helps Google understand that we own a local business and what it is about. Giving Google more context around our business helps improve our local ranking.

To make the job easier for ourself, go to Google’s Structured Markup Helper and follow the instructions. Select “Local Businesses” from the options and enter the website’s URL.

The visual editor lets us tag elements on the website with the appropriate markups.

Add as many tags as possible to provide detailed information about our website to Google. Make sure all the information we tag is consistent with our Google My Business profile. After adding all the tags, click on “Create HTML” and the tool will generate structured data in JSON-LD format for our website.