So what is local SEO playbook? A Local SEO Playbook is a new way of building a checklist of action plans and implementations to take in local search for local businesses. This local SEO playbook will define local SEO, what steps you can communicate with businesses and discover new approach.

Local SEO is essential to smaller businesses that operate on a regional level or servicing selected location. While national SEO focuses more on ranking across the country, local SEO prioritizes appearing on SERPs in a specific location. This technique depends on marketing your brand, products, and service to local customers. We filed them up and consider this as your Local SEO Playbook.

Create Your Google My Business Account: optimizing your Google My Business listing as your business profile is the first and most effective way in doing local SEO and rank higher in Google map search. Least you expect is you will gain visibility through Google search local results. Setting up your Google My Business account will need all necessary information about your business added in your dashboard and once verified this will be use in displaying on Google local search results, Google search knowledge panel and Google Maps.

Customer Reviews: Inviting your customer to leave and write positive glowing reviews about your business will not just optimize your GMB listing but will also boost your presence and authority online. It will encourage more local consumers to consider your service because of these reviews.

A Quick Tip That I Usually Recommend To My Local SEO Clients So They Can Get Reviews:

• Ask for a review in person when a customer buys in your physical store
• Send an SMS post-purchase as a survey about the product/service – if they are satisfied, then asked them if they can leave some reviews
• Respond to existing reviews- thanked them and address any complaints. Remember that we cannot please everybody.
• Send out coupon for customers that leave a reviews for their next purhcase.

Voice Search Optimization: Voice search will grow rapidly in the future. Therefore, in local SEO, it is crucial to optimize Q&A queries when people speak into their device instead of typing out their searches. Essentially, customers will use long-tail keywords when doing voice searches compared to a regular search. Your SEO content will also adjust to fit more with the tone and be conversational. You will also consider including traditional question starters in your content.

It is also significant to include user intent keywords optimizing for voice, as these searches are often used when searching for specific information.

Content Based On Local News Stories: When dealing with content creation, there is nothing quite like creating a content that relates and speaks local issue in order to grab your targeted customer’s attention.

Few strategies:

• blog post around local news, events and activities.
• creating videos about local charities within your area that can build brand awareness
• Create more local pages
• Collaborate with other local business relevant to what you are doing and let them know that you will include them in your content.

Website For Mobile: In 2018, mobile vs desktop trends found out that the shift to mobile is increasing faster. Mobile visits to websites grew from 2016 to 2017, and the overall visits to websites from desktop shrunk to 37%. 

This confirms that you have to optimize your website for mobile to be a player in local SEO and just not that but to play with Google’s latest Core Web Vitals update.

Local Keywords: your keywords should be relevant to your local customers, include navigational keywords, transactional keywords, and user intent. There are lots of keyword tools that you can use out there – Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Ask The Community and more.

Local Landing Pages: if you have more than one serviced area, creating local pages are really important for your business. These pages need to have:

• operating hours
• NAP (business name, address, phone)
• descriptions
• reviews (if possible)
• promotions
• parking availability
• Google maps attached

Each of this location will need unique content for each pages. If you are servicing one area, then you can just create a dedicated page as your funnel and rank it in search engine.

Link Signals: according to Moz, link signals are the first-and-second most important factor in Local search results and most of all organic results. These are backlinks linking to your website. 

Local Service Pages: While it is very easy to just put your products or services in just one huge page, a dedicated page with unique content is the best way when you are doing local SEO. Your local SEO juice will not be powerful if you just have it in one place and could lower down your possible ranking. 

What Is Being More Important In Local SEO

Google and SEO changes quite rapidly. You never know when they will introduce new features on its SERPs, but you can count and anticipate that more changes are coming. That is why it is important to be on top of our Local SEO effort. By implementing actionable items and offering something for local businesses, your will ensure that you will have solid foundation when a new SEO feature will be released. And if you don’t have the bandwidth to make the alteration, you may want to try an independent SEO contractor that can deliver you results.