Local SEO is crucial for any business for getting more traffic from visitors in your city or region. In this article we will discuss how to do keyword targeting for local SEO. Let’s examine all the details together. In general, if you want to target a keyword, you can include your target keyword in the following fields:
- Page title
- Meta description
- URLs
- Titles
- Internal linking
Let’s examine these areas in more detail.
Meta tags provide more information about an HTML file. Meta tags are not visible to users, but search engines can see and use this code. Page titles and meta descriptions are popular meta tags.
Page title
A page title is one of the keyword-sensitive areas of a web page, and is one of the most important page elements that should be optimized for ranking local search results.
If you want to be in local rankings, it’s very important to include the destination keyword with the city name (especially your main service pages) in each of your page titles.
By doing so, if a potential customer calls your service when he or she is in your city, or if he adds the city name to search queries, you now have the chance to appear in the top positions in the search results.
Page Title Length
Currently, it is recommended that you keep the page titles below 60 characters. What if you have words cut off at the end of the page title? Do the words at the end of the page title help rank the page, even if you don’t see keywords in the SERPs?
Joel Headley performed a very interesting page title test where he added random letters to the end of some page titles. On average, these page titles were 196 characters long, longer than the recommended length. If you have important keywords to add to your page titles, don’t be afraid to include them, even if your page title is slightly longer than the recommended length. These keywords can help local SEO and rank the page higher even if you don’t see it in the page title on Google.
Meta Description
Exceeding your target keywords in the meta description is not a ranking factor, but may convince users to click your search result instead of other results. Including your service and city name in the meta description doesn’t help you rank for this keyword phrase, but lets users know what you’re offering and where you’re offering it. This will increase the likelihood that they will click your result.
For example:
<Head>
<meta name = ”decscription” content = ”XYZ has been providing plumbing services in Edinburgh for more than 5 years. Contact us now! “>
</ Head>
URLs
Adding your target keyword to your URL can have ranking benefits for local SEO. Besides users know exactly what the page is about.
Titles
The headline (also known as h1) is an important element that should include your target keywords. This is another field you need to include your target keyword phrase with the city you’re targeting. Google may pay more attention to the “highlighted” areas of the page, such as the main title.
As an example your page title can include the following: ABC Restaurant – Restaurant in New Town, Edinburgh or ABC Repairing – Car Repairing Services in Leith, Edinburgh
It is also recommended to add the variations of your keywords in h2 and h3 titles.
Keyword-rich Internal links
It’s not a secret that adding internal links to your site containing your target keywords is a factor for ranking. A variety of case studies show that how internal links increase organic traffic by 40%. So how to optimize internal links for local SEO? For each page you want to rank, add a moderate number of internal links pointing to other pages on your site. When you link to the target page, use the keywords and phrases you want the target page to rank on as anchor texts.