How Do You Optimise for Local Search When You Have No Physical Location?
Accessing the internet through smartphones, and the use of the “near me” searches whilst on the go means local visibility is as important as ever. It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is. You want to be seen by your local audience, even if you don’t have a physical location.
Standing out in competitive local search results against businesses that have a brick and mortar store can be tough. But, it’s not impossible. All you need to do is ensure your business ranks highly for local search terms. Here are a few SEO tactics to help your business rank in local search – even if you have no physical location.
Precision of Search
Is your target audience searching for you by country, city, postcode or actual address? If your audience is using local queries to find your site, avoid stuffing your pages with those keywords. Keyword stuffing is an attempt to get your site to rank higher in local search results. However, if you’re already appearing under those results, determine whether you actually need location pages at all.
Local Content
Producing local content is a great way to try and rank in local search results. Location-specific content helps people associate you with your local area – which is specifically important when you don’t have a physical location. Writing content on topics concerning your local area is good proof for Google concerning your location, and authority.
Types of content you could produce to help cement yourself as an authoritative voice in your local industry is; News topics – any kind of local news that is relevant to you. This could be covering a local story and making it so you can promote yourself at the same time. For example, if you run a restaurant, and there is new legislation on food and drink, write about that. Other examples are writing about clients – if you are targeting a specific city, and you have clients are based there, write about what they do and link to their site. This acts as promotional content for both you and them. Finally, create case studies about your customers in your local area as this is a great way to boost credibility.
Google My Business
Even if you don’t have a physical location, you can still show up in Google my business. If you fill in your Google my business listing properly, you can still be listed locally. To do this, you need to put in your “service area”. This is the area where you sell your products or services. Though you don’t have a physical location, delivering goods or service in a local area is enough to let you appear in local search results. You will have to put in an address, but this can be your home address and it can also be kept from the public. To finalise your listing, verify your business. Then your business should appear like all other local businesses in your service area.
User-Generated Content
Adding user-generated content to your site such as testimonials and reviews is ideal for building your reputation and authority, especially in your local area. Not only is it good for this, it’s also good for showing potential customers that your business services multiple locations.
Get your customers to leave you testimonials on TripAdvisor and Google Maps. Then also get them to leave you Facebook reviews as well. Ensure that you transfer some of those reviews onto your website so they are clear to see.
Focus on local content, local news, and reviews from local customers in order to boost your local SEO. By focusing on content and reviews, you will increase your local visibility. If you don’t have a physical location – this is key!