Many small businesses find it difficult to compete with major e-commerce players like the world-dominating Amazon and Walmart. For a while, this presented a difficult situation for neighbourhood community stores because of their lower prices and accessible shipping, making it difficult to compete.
How To Create A Local SEO Retail Plan
There are many components to a local SEO strategy, but the following are the ones you should pay the most attention to:
- Keyword analysis using regional terms.
- Make the target location clear.
- Mapping The Products You Sell
- Make Pages That Comply With The “Location + Product” Search Intent
- Perform regional on-page optimizations
- Improve the entire website.
- Use Google Business Profile.
Let’s get started on the procedures for developing a local SEO plan for the retail industry.
Keyword analysis using regional terms.
Therefore, you are already aware of keyword research and its importance to your plan. It’s time to figure out how to do it now. You will need some digital marketing tools to start. Some SEO tools, more specifically. We’ll walk you through the most pertinent ones later, so don’t worry about picking one right now.
The user’s intent is important. Marketers employ a clever technique to locate it: they google the relevant KW and then monitor the results. You can learn how Google interprets a particular expression by doing that.
For instance, there are numerous guides on what, why, and how to do digital marketing if you Google that term.
The goal is to learn more about the topic because it’s simple to assume that this KW is very nebulous and broad.
Google users are searching for information, not necessarily a specific product.
It is possible to categorize keyword intent in some ways. Such as:
Informational: The user merely seeks to learn more about the subject.
Navigational: When people want to visit a specific website, they type its name into the search bar (for example, “rock content blog”).
Transactional: Users are looking to make an immediate purchase.
Hosting webinars is a fantastic way to boost your authority when discussing informational keywords and positively affect your SEO strategy.
Make the target location clear.
Knowing which location would be affected is the first step in organizing your content strategy with local SEO in mind. A physical store visit results from 76% of “near me” searches. You want a “near me” search to generate results for your company. The location of your company, therefore, demands special consideration.
Make a list of the places where your company provides delivery services. All of the city? several cities? Several neighbourhoods only? Who are those people?
Mapping The Products You Sell
This step has already been finished if your company conducts online sales. You can proceed to the following step once you have a list of pages for each item. If you run a physical store, the following steps should be followed to add the items from your sales catalogue to a spreadsheet and create categories: Know how your target market might want to buy and bundle products.
Recognize how your goods fit into corresponding categories, such as “snow coats” or “snowboard accessories.” Sort your products into the categories you establish using these associated groups.
Let’s imagine you run a real winter sports equipment shop. Creating a page for each product wouldn’t be appropriate since you don’t intend to sell goods online, and customers will buy from physical stores instead.
To display your grouped products, you should instead make a page just for the categories, such as “snow coats” or “snowboard accessories,” and link to those pages from your product grouping pages.
Make Pages That Comply With The “Location + Product” Search Intent.
Once you’ve assembled all your product or category pages, you’ll need to check that your new pages include a location field.
You can accomplish this task by applying the “location + product” formula and including the resulting phrase on your page.
For instance:
Snow accessories in Colorado, Woody Creek boots, and Aspen coats
The user is searching for these products in that area and is very close to making a purchase, as evidenced by these search intent examples.
Ecommerce stores should construct or update their unique product-specific pages, just a reminder. Instead, physical stores should only create pages for broad product categories (such as boots, gloves, etc.) that describe the items that fall under those categories.
Perform regional on-page optimizations
It’s time to implement on-page SEO now. Similar to conventional SEO tactics, you should:
- Create SEO titles using the product name and company location for all pages.
- Consider the target keywords when optimizing the image metadata (alt text, file name, etc.).
- Write at least 300 words on each page, incorporating key phrases throughout the content.
- Make sure your meta descriptions highlight the company’s location and draw the user in.
- After all, location-based search intent, in which users take into account physical locations to make a purchase, is the key distinction between local SEO and conventional SEO strategies.
Improve the entire website.
It’s time to update the rest of your website after updating your product or category pages.
To make it easier for Google crawlers to understand how localized your pages are, you should:
- Add a Google Maps widget with the address of your company to the footer. Use your headquarters’ address if you only conduct online business.
- Make a page that lists each store’s location and description.
- When possible, include location-related keywords in the meta tags of your home page.
- Make a blog that offers advice on specific products and locations.
Use Google Business Profile.
Google Business Profiles are 100% integrated with your domain even though they aren’t technically a part of your website. It would help if you used them to drive traffic to establishments with physical locations.
Maintain the following information in your Google Business Profile and optimize it for local searches:
- opening times
- Store pictures.
- Address.
- Contact information (s).
- URL of a website (s).
- responses