Strategies to Boost Your Local Online Presence In Google

Strategies to Boost Your Local Online Presence In Google

The best way to improve your brand’s online presence to your local customers is to do better local SEO. Local SEO is important to boost your online presence regardless of which country you are specifically targeting because it is the most efficient way to bring your potential customers to your website, which is the spot where you can best show your brand’s strengths.

Google accounts for a dominant percentage among search engines on most of the countries globally and the search volume is growing every year. Every category of mobile search queries are growing rapidly- mobile searches for “stores near me” have grown by over 250% for two years, “where to buy” grown by over 200%, “on sale” grown by over 250%- making it important to strategically plan and publish local contents on Google if you want to execute efficient SEO practices.

Improving Your Presence on Google

When people in each local areas search for some product or business, Google will show the results based on local relevancy based on the distance data from Maps or Search. Google shows users the search result that would be most relevant or nearby so that the result would actually resonate with their search intents. Several factors can give influences to your rankings on Google in local areas, including the three main factors below:

• Relevance: Relevance means how well your local Google Business Profile matches with what the potential customers are searching for, in terms of keywords, contents, or search intents. You can update your brand’s information correctly and up to date to improve your local rankings on Google.
• Distance: Distance mostly mean the actual distance between your brand or service and the local user. Google considers how far the search results are from the location that a search happened. In case the user’s exact search location is not specified, Google calculates the distance based on the provided or inferred information about the location.
• Prominence: Prominence equals to how well known your brand is. Google search results reflect the offline local rankings- well-know brands in the offline world are more likely to be ranked in search results as well. Prominence also is relevant with the information that Google has about your business which can be found in websites, links, articles, directories, or even review scores on Google Reviews. More accurate information and more positive reviews will give positive impact to your local ranking. Adjusting your position on SERP is also important, where your SEO best practices should be applied.

These three factors will be the determining factors of your local Google ranking, so you should make sure that your brand satisfies these factors for your local rankings.

How to Publish Highly-Engaging Organic Contents on Google

Expanding your online presence in Google, a dominant search engine in most of the countries around the globe, would require a strategic approach to resonate with the unique characteristics each local market. By implementing following strategies, you would be able to effectively maximize your brand’s visibility and engagement.

Keyword Research

Optimizing keyword strategies is always one of the most important parts in any SEO strategies, including in all local markets that you are planning to enter. The first step would be researching target keywords to identify high-volume keywords in both English and other local languages. In the process, you will get clearer glimpse of the local users’ search intent and behaviors which will lead you to strategically incorporate these keywords into your website contents, blog posts, or social media uploads. Moreover, leveraging long-tail keywords and making localized variations will guide you to target more niche markets within the area.

To find local keywords that you can use for your Google organic contents, you can use several different ways you can use including the measures below:

• Manual keyword research: Manual research is the most basic way to identify keywords for your local contents. Identifying the brand-relevant keywords that resonates with local trends can help you drive more local traffic to your website and increase conversions.

• Competitor Keyword Research: One of the effective ways to find out keywords to utilize is to competitor keyword research. By defining your competitor and identifying the competitor keywords, you can easily prioritize which keywords to target first.

• Consider Google Autocompleted Keywords: One of the time-saving ways to find long-tail keywords for your local contents is to use the autocompleted keywords that Google search provides. Google’s autocomplete predictions are based on diverse factors including the location, so these keywords will provide you the list of keywords that your potential customers are likely to search.

  Google Autocompleted Keywords

• Consider Local Status of the Keywords: It is helpful to organize the local information about each keyword, such as search volumes according to each country, difficulties, number of organic posts, or monthly search volume trends. To find out keyword metrics according to local areas, you can use various SEO tools.

  Filtering the country as ‘Singapore’ in SEMrush’s Keyword Overview Tool
  Filtering the country as ‘Singapore’, and language as ‘Chinese’ in Ubersuggest’s Keyword Research Tool

• Google Keyword Planner: You can use Google Keyword Planner to identify brand-relevant keywords. With the tool, you can identify the keywords based on you and your competitors’ domains and also gain monthly search trends on specific local areas- which will help you prioritize certain keywords when planning contents.

Localized Contents

Generating and publishing localized contents is crucial to enlarge engagement from local audiences. Moreover, well-localized contents also plays an essential role to establish connections between potential customers and brands. You can plan your organic contents based on the keywords, starting from the keywords with larger search volumes, to maximize the exposure opportunity on Google SERP.

Using the keywords that you researched using the measures above, you can organize the keywords and plan the organic contents to be published on Google accordingly. You can use the template below to strategically plan the contents for each local areas.

Planning Organic Content on Google Template

On columns B to G, you can record the basic information about each content including index numbers, publishing quarters, target country and language, article titles, and categories.

On columns H, I, and J, you can update the up-to-date status of each content.

On columns K to S, you can put in the actual plannings of each content. You can define your target audience on column K, and record which keywords to use and the keywords’ monthly search volumes(MSVs) on Google on columns L to Q.

On columns T to W, you can record the checklists after uploading the contents.

On columns X to AI, you can put in the data collected after publishing, to monitor the performance of your organic contents on Google SERP and reflect these results on your future contents.

Google Business Profile for Better Online Presence

A Google Business Profile is a free business profile that shows the basic information about your brand and service. It includes information such as name of your brand, location, services, products, or photos.

To improve your brand’s local ranking on Google, you can register or update your Google Business Profile to make sure that your business information has better visibility. Google Business Profile has an overall impact on your local ranking on different sections of Google SERP, including Google Search, Google Maps, or Google Shopping. If your Google Business Profile is inaccurate, incomplete, or not existing, information about your brand might not show up for the local users on Google SERP. By updating your business profile, you will be able to get more users engaged, by ranking on the upper page on the Google SERP when users search keywords that are relevant with your brand.

Just by well establishing your Google Business Profile, you can earn a competitive advantage on local Google SERPs. You can try to update your Google Business Profile within the guidelines, to maximize your visibility.

Conclusion

Enhancing your local online presence in Google requires a multi-angle approach to cover various sections of Google SERP. To do so, you should execute various strategies that resonate with each local markets. By executing local SEO practices such as planning and publishing localized contents, or optimizing your Google Business Profile, you should continuously ensure if your brand meets Google’s examining factors for local rankings. Implementing these strategies will help you maximize your organic traffic, conversions, and visibility on Google.