If you are looking to get local traffic to your website, you are probably interested in developing a good search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to get the right visitors to help grow your business and improve your bottom line. Many people see how important local SEO efforts are for many businesses. Since 2011, the number of people who have searched Google for products and services “near me” has increased by at least 34 times, according to a Search Engine Journal report from 2015. Getting the most from your local SEO strategy is not rocket science but it does take some effort and work.

1. Pick the right keywords for your campaign. This is the first thing you need to decide when you are working on your local SEO campaign. Simply put, your keywords are really phrases that your customers search for. When a person does a search for doctors in Miami, if you have a medical office in the Miami area, you want your website to pop up. While you do not need to use a Miami SEO firm to get the results, you want the keywords, “Miami” and “doctor” to appear in your content and in various other areas of your website. They key here is to find keywords that are germane to your business. There are Google tools out there that can help you and you should always be testing different keywords and measuring how successful they are.
2. Content is still king. You need to produce good quality content that has your keywords in it so that it helps with your local SEO efforts and drives traffic to your site but it has to give some value to your visitors so they come back. All of your content needs to be great. This means your landing pages, blog posts, ecommerce pages and all social media posts have to be of a good enough quality for them to impress your visitors and give them a reason to return to your website and buy your products and services.
3. Look at what your competitors are doing. You may want to switch to the setting for private browsing when you are looking into how your competition is doing its local SEO. There are a few reasons for this. You do not want your searches to have any impact on what pops up in your search engine searches. Do a search for the keywords you want to use for your site. Again using the “doctors in Miami” example, search for that. Look at the pages that pop up closer to the top of the results page. Those websites represent your competition. Take a look at their content and compare it to your own.
4. Place your keywords all over. They need to be in the domain name, URL, page title and descriptions. The most important space for you to put your keyword. Your keywords need to be in places where they will be found by the spiders that crawl across the web and index it for Google.You should place your keywords should also be placed in your header, tag line and in the sub headers. The exact phrase you want people to use to find you needs to be in the sub headers, too. You will do yourself a lot of favors by putting your keywords in the your image descriptions.
5. Link to other parts of your website. Your content should have links to other content on your website. One blog post can and should reference another post and information that is related to what your post is about. If you have a medical practice and you have provided information about vaccinations, the next time you have some content about this or another similar topic, link back the older content that is still on your website.
6. Get other sites to link to you. This is a great way to get Google to see your content as being valuable. This is something you will have to work for and will require you to contact the owners of other websites who you would like to link back to your content.

Your local SEO strategy can take work but will help you grow your business.