February 28, 2023

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Local SEO Challenges & How to Solve Them?

Home Blog workflow Local SEO Challenges & How to Solve Them?

While some local SEO issues only affect businesses with physical locations, others only affect service providers without a real presence in the regions where they want to rank well in searches. When it comes to obtaining organic search traffic, this is a major issue. The local map pack appears 30% of the time, and those links get more than 70% of organic search traffic, according to Search Engine Journal. It should come as no surprise that large businesses rely on local SEO to draw customers into their stores or connect them with their services.

1. Keeping Your Google Business Profile Up to Date

The content in your Google Business Profile does not belong to you. In reality, Google is always free to modify the details of your Business Profile, formerly known as Google My Business. Included are your main category, summary, operating times, address, phone number, and website address. Maintaining your local presence once it has been established is crucial. IMPORTANT: Google frequently adds new categories and properties. Long-tail searches have a huge first-mover advantage for brands that act swiftly on fresh discovery opportunities.

2. Checking Different Stores in the Same Place

There are certain places that house multiple enterprises. Consider Baskin-Robbins and Dunkin Donuts as examples. Despite being independent companies, both work out of the same space. Due to the possibility that Google may claim the address is already occupied, it may be challenging to verify all of the firms’ information on Google Business Profile. Verifying Several Stores in One Place The “store within a store” model is one approach to this problem, where you can emphasise that one store exists inside the other. Each can gain a place in the local pack using that strategy. So long as you provide Google the right data, it will continue to develop and get better in this area. Automobile dealerships are another illustration; separate listings for “Thompson Ford” and “Thompson Hyundai” are possible. Similarly, if you have the reverse issue—many duplicate listings—undoubtedly it’s affecting your ranks and search exposure. Simply deleting the extras will solve the problem in this instance.

3. Poor site architecture

All forms of SEO still depend on usability, but local SEO has a unique component to be mindful of: the store locator. We can observe that the majority of companies give customers a search bar to locate locations. Users benefit from this, but search engine bots cannot follow a search bar. Optimizing the Architecture of Your Website for Local Instead, provide the bots a State > City > Location breadcrumb to help them find their way. If this isn’t already present on your website and you find it difficult to add it, ClarityAutomate, a platform for carrying out SEO, is part of seoClarity. It enables the widespread implementation of breadcrumbs across your websites. You can automatically pull in and use some page components, such as the page title or header, as the breadcrumb text. PRO TIP: Make sure to link from the location pages to the category pages as well. This communicates to Google the relevance of your location to certain categories.

4. Content Specific to a Location

Each location page on your website needs to have its own unique content, much like the Google Business Profile entries. The landing pages for location-specific information should tell a consistent narrative that corresponds to the content you’ve added to your business profile. It is not sufficient to just upload the data to your profile. To truly prove it and provide the search engine with pertinent data, you need to have the material on your website. This is the union of your local content with the upkeep of the knowledge panel’s information. Additionally, Google is able to get certain details and qualities from your website to show them in the map listing, so be sure to include any pertinent information! These are components like menu choices or reviews.

Location-Specific Pages Creation

Use an AI content optimizer like Content Fusion to comprehend the specifics of a certain city or even neighbourhood well enough to produce a location-specific landing page. Even if you are not directly familiar with the area, it delivers insights about it utilising NLP and machine learning to feed facts about that question, eliminating the need for study.

5. Refreshing Your NAP

Always keep your name, address, and phone number (NAP) current. However, a lot of people now refer to this as NAP+W, where “W” stands for web URL. Verifying that your NAP is accurate for the locations where your clients anticipate it is essential. Put this data in place for people conducting actual searches rather than the search engine algorithm. The search engines used to value having your citations updated anywhere they could be found online, but this is no longer the case.

Places to Update Your NAP

Google is the main site where you should check NAP accuracy, but you should also check Apple, Bing, and Facebook Local. These additional search engines are sometimes overlooked by businesses! Then there are niches that are focused on a certain industry, such as TripAdvisor for hotels and tourist sites and Yelp for restaurants, salons, and professional services. If you use the correct local SEO tool, you can manage citations. To aid you in your quest, we’ve gathered some of the top local SEO tools available.

Local SEO Challenges Particular to Businesses in the Service Area

Some companies only provide services, in which case they don’t have a physical storefront. Consider a professional service like plumbing or a delivery service. Gaining visibility in online searches is made more difficult by this, but it is still feasible.

As we close

We can only say that local SEO has its unique difficulties, each barrier may be overcome. If you don’t have a physical store, you can still get search visibility, so don’t worry. Here is hoping that you have understood how to solve local SEO challenges. In case you need a consultant to oversee your problems, you can get in touch with a reliable managed SEO provider.

Tejas V

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