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Local SEO is basically optimising your business and website for local search. What this means is that anytime a potential customer in your area or vicinity looks up a product that your business offers, you should pop up in their Google search.

For example, you’re a Melbourne home baker who offers customised cupcakes. If anyone in Melbourne searches the term ‘customised cupcakes near me’, you want to be on the first page of Google to be more discoverable.

So, here is the Local SEO Checklist - the best practices to optimise your business for local SEO and local searches. We hope that this helps you to get a whack load of business in before the end of the year!

Set up your local business profile for Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp, Bing Local and Yahoo Local. The steps are pretty simple but you don’t want to leave it at just your business name. The customer should have all the information they’re looking for. This includes location and contact details - website, phone number, photos and videos of the products (and store), business hours and price listings. Businesses often lose out on a customer just because a detail like store hours aren’t available online and hence, go with another business. 

Ratings just don’t cut it anymore! Reviews give credibility to your business. The higher the review, the higher the business listing on shows up on search engines. The difference between someone going to your business over a competitor could be one positive review. They also serve as great content for social media. 

We know how difficult it can be to ask your customers for reviews. But if they like it, wouldn't they want to let others know how much they like your product(s) or services? You could maybe put in some incentives for reviews if you want to speed things up. 

It’s important that you use industry-specific keywords on every page of your website. Add these to the URLs and to text and images. Your website should also be mobile-friendly, safe and secure (switch to SSL if you haven’t already), set up for Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Be sure to create separate keyword specific pages for each of your products and services. 

Keeping a blog is so important because it not only increases the authority level of your website, it also allows your customers to find you. Create content that uses keywords your target audience searches for. Once you decide on the primary and secondary keywords, allow them to fill up 1-2% of the content, in the URL, meta description, headings and sub-headings, and in the headline. To create SEO optimised content, you should also do a bit of interlinking and get backlinks. 

Optimising your business and website for SEO is pretty simple but it takes a long time to appear on the first page of Google. Constantly put out keyword-rich content your target audience looks for and more importantly, put out valuable information. Google is going to ignore you if you just stuff the content with keywords as many businesses do.

Keep working at it and you’re going to see the results! 

There are so many aspects to SEO, so be sure to bookmark this local SEO checklist. 

If you don’t want to take this herculean task all on your own, think about outsourcing it. We talk about the importance of delegating and outsourcing work, especially as a small business in this article. 

To your success in this modern world,