SEO is critical to make your online business visible to the target audience. No matter how good your product is and how much value it adds to your customers’ lives, if nobody knows about it, all your hard work will go wasted. Local SEO is for businesses that want to capture global marketplaces. You can not do SEO once for all markets; you have to target them individually through local SEO.
For local SEO, you can hire a language service provider or localization expert. Moreover, using a professional cloud based localization management system will also allow you to effectively manage your local SEO for multiple regions.
In this article, we will discuss the best local SEO practices that all global businesses must adopt to enhance their global brand visibility.
What is Local SEO?
In local SEO, you optimize your website for local search engine results considering various geographical factors. You have to do local keyword research to find out the phrases and terminologies your target audiences are using to look online for products and services similar to yours. Local SEO increases your website’s visibility in all targeted regions. So, even if you are not physically operating in a geographical area, you can still make your brand virtually available and accessible to your customers with local SEO.
Things to Consider While Doing Local SEO
Search engines respond very differently to people speaking different languages around the world. Considering the language differences, you have to conduct separate keyword research for all regions. Following are some best local SEO practices you must employ for your on-page and off-page search engine optimization.
On-Page Local SEO
Doing on-page local SEO is significant to your international brand representation and targeting local languages. By partnering with a language service provider or using a translation project management platform, you can easily manage your multilingual SEO. You can conduct a competitor’s analysis to understand their SEO game. When it comes to local SEO, getting your keyword right is the most critical thing.
Landing Pages Localization
Even when you manage to get some visitors to your website, if it is not localized and translated into the local language, it will only increase your bounce rate. Visiting a website that is in another that you don’t understand badly affects your overall brand experience. So, the main rule of local SEO is to localize your landing pages. From translating your textual content to providing local telephone and addresses, all add to the overall user experience on your website.
Metadata
When you search for someone online, the website’s page title and description appear on the search engine results; it is metadata. Even if your website appeared on top of the search result, whether or not an online user would visit your website highly depends on how well you have created your metadata. You should carefully translate your meta info to get the maximum clicks. Meta titles should be less than 70 characters, and meta descriptions should be less than 150 characters, including spaces.
URL Structure
Some languages take up more space than others, so you have to keep it in mind. Translating your website into other languages, you must keep your URL short with relevant keywords only. Avoid using a long URL structure; it is a bad SEO practice.
Headers
Use proper headings in your page content; it would help the website crawlers to prioritize the content accordingly. So, use H1 (for titles) and H2, H3, and so on for subheadings. Using headings and subheadings would make your content look more presentable, and its readability will also increase significantly.
Visual Graphics
Just like text, you must add culturally appropriate graphics to your website’s pages. First of all, use optimized images that are lightweight so they don’t affect the speed of your website. Use a keyword for the image name, and keep it in PNG format if possible. Using a cloud based localization management system would help you localize your website pages and perform image localization.
Off-page Local SEO
Off-page factors like website speed, keyword density, and responsiveness are also important to consider. It would enhance user experience and give you a competitive edge.
Website Speed
Your site speed has a lot to do with your user experience, bounce rate, and SEO rankings. Nobody likes to wait on a slow website; you users would rather leave your website and look for a better alternative. To optimize the speed of your website, compress HTML, remove unrequired CSS, and the closure compiler to execute JavaScript faster.
Backlinks
For better SEO ranking, you would need more backlinks pointing to your website for different locations. It is the best way to drive more traffic to your website and increase your search engine rankings organically. Create more backlinks from a local website that are also in native languages. Getting backlinks from websites with good domain authority would also improve your rankings.
Hreflang Tags
Hreflang tags are used to tell the search engine about the language of the given web page. You can see these tags on the URL extension that ends or start with .es, .cn, .fr, etc. It is also valuable information for your search engines to index your website for different locations accordingly.
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