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Local SEO Best Practices for WordPress Websites

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Local SEO Best Practices – If you are into a local business and you use WordPress CMS to manage your website and customer, then you have got many opportunities to thrive on local tactics. Optimizing the WordPress platform for local SEO is much easier compared to other platforms.

Even if you are new to WordPress, we will help you with the best local SEO practices that you can implement to boost your website’s local rankings. If you wonder if local SEO is important then you should know that more than 80% of the customers search the products or services before they buy from a local market.

So, to ensure your website is visible to the right set of audiences, you need to ensure the local SEO elements are properly optimized and working. On this note, check out the local SEO services best practices for your WordPress website.

Content optimization

The first step towards optimizing your site is in-depth content optimization. While optimizing the content for local SEO, you need to target as many as possible local keywords that your potential customers are searching for. Along with your main competitive keywords, when you add localized keywords the visibility improves drastically.

The best part about local SEO is that when you optimize the content with local phrases and queries, there are higher chances of ranking on top positions. Even if the website’s domain authority is lower, you can rank your website for competitive keywords. One thing you need to keep in mind is that the content should be of high quality and information-driven.

Check your link profiles

Backlinks play a vital role in local SEO and you need to keep an eye on your website’s link profile. To boost local SEO, you need to ensure that all the links are genuine and of high quality. While building links, one thing you need to keep in mind is to always build links that are relevant to your industry.

Relevancy plays a much crucial role in boosting your website’s ranking in local SEO. Google and other search engines seek higher relevance factors in the backlinks that you are creating for the website. Focus on creating quality backlinks instead of going after the quantity of the links.

Optimize the anchor text

Most people overlook this optimization practice but this can bring massive results to your local SEO efforts. Having the right anchor text for a link is as important as having a good quality link. Whether you perform internal linking or external linking or you create backlinks, ensure you choose the right keywords.

When the links are placed with the right anchor text, the possibility of your website ranking for that phrase improves drastically. However, there is no such percentage of how many links anchor text you should have on one page, but they should be context-adding and value-driven to the users.

Focus on the website’s speed

Speed is a major ranking factor and it implies local SEO also. Google and other search engines pay great focus to how fast the website loads. A fast-loading website improves the overall user experience and the bounce rate is also reduced with it. You can use the Google Pagespeed Insights tool to check how fast the website is.

Ensure the website loads faster in both desktop and mobile versions because most of the visitors use their smartphones to perform local searches. You will find a lot of WordPress plugins that purge cache to improve the website’s performance.

Mobile-first indexing

In 2021, mobile-first indexing updates will be a major consideration for all businesses. Mobile-first indexing means the search engine will index the mobile version of your website and the desktop version will be indexed later. To thrive online and gain more traction from the local market, make sure your website is optimized for mobile devices and it’s working seamlessly.

Google’s Core Web Vital is this year’s biggest update and mobile-first indexing is a major part of that update. So, it’s better to focus on your website’s overall user experience and reduce the website’s bounce rate to rank higher.

Add structured data

The last but most important thing is to implement structured data on your website. When you optimize your website for structured data, it becomes much easier for search bots to scan, index, and rank your website. There are several Structured data plugins available for free on WordPress that you can use to take an extra edge. Having structured data also improves the overall browsing experience of your website.

Along with the plugin, you can also create the structured data manually using online tools and verify using Google’s open-source tool. Adding the structured data will help you boost the SEO services from a long-term perspective.

These were the most powerful local SEO best practices for WordPress websites that you can follow to gain more traction, traffic, and sales from the local community.