The words you use to perform your search. Perhaps most importantly, they will give very clear indications of your search intent.
Your browsing history, which may indicate your preferences or tastes.
Your geographic location, either through GPS or your IP address, to display products or services located in your vicinity.
The type of device you use. For example, a mobile search usually refers to a need you want to solve at that moment.
The time at which you make the query, which could be used to give preference to those establishments that are open at that time.
When a user performs a local search, Google analyzes all the information it has about that user, tries to determine what their most likely search intent is, and selects the websites that can best satisfy it to generate the results page.
This process identifies two aspects on which we will have to work to optimize the local positioning of a website:
Determine which search intentions we can respond to with maximum user satisfaction.
Make all the information we provide through different means (website, social profiles, directories, publications, etc.) reflect our ability to meet that search intent.
Monitor your positions in the “local package”
One of the first steps in any local SEO campaign is to monitor where we rank and how our competition ranks; specifically, in the local pack and by tracking positions over time.
Virtually any position monitoring tool allows you to do this, but the problem with Local SEO is that the influence of the location from which the search is performed is very large and can vary greatly in just a few hundred meters.
If we only track our positions from a single geographic location (such as “Seville”), we will only see a small representation of where and how we position ourselves in the real world.
We can use other tools that analyze and track our positions around a specific physical point, to cover the entire city or surrounding areas.
Prepare your company's listing for local SEO: What is NAP?
If you read a little about Local SEO, you will see that there is an acronym that is repeated a lot, NAP, which comes from the English expression “Name, Address, Phone Number”.
The insistent emphasis of NAP on Local SEO is due to some very simple and obvious reasons, since we need:
A name that identifies the company without ambiguity or error.
An address that clearly locates the area of influence of that company.
A telephone number for users to contact the company.
But the relevance of NAP goes beyond users knowing our name, where we are or how to contact us.
If you ask me, all that information is already on the website.
So why so much insistence on the NAP?
If we don't have a clear and unique name and location for our business, how can Google's crawler identify us on those external websites and link us to the information they contain about us?
Given the degree of competitiveness of Local SEO (just look at the few prominent positions it has in organic searches), a typo or inconsistency in the NAP on any of these external websites can cause us to lose an opportunity to improve our positioning.
We must ensure that all the information these external references have about us is correct and consistent with each other.
A small discrepancy can cause Google to believe that it refers to two different entities and we lose the momentum of one of those references.
For example, in my case, there is a big difference between searching for “Antonio Fernández Alonso” or “Antonio Fdez. Alonso”, so I try to make sure that my references include the full name:
Therefore, our next task, after keyword analysis, philippine area code to optimize local searches will be to create our business profile, which will include the NAP, among other data.
Note that I am not limiting myself to just NAP, but I extend it to practically all the information that we can provide about our business, since it will be useful to us during the execution of the local SEO action plan.
This company profile, which would be a kind of “About us”, should contain at least the following information:
The NAP, trying to be as detailed as possible in our address, including street, number, town and province.
Description of the entity, of at least 300 words, including the main keywords that we want to highlight and that we have previously identified in our analysis.
Geographic coordinates of the address; that is, its latitude and longitude.
Our opening hours, distinguishing between those days that may have special hours (such as Fridays, Saturdays or holidays).
A list of 5-6 categories related to our activity. In my case, for example, I could include “Digital Marketing”, “Web Positioning”, “Search Engine Optimization” and “SEO Consulting”.
Our website URL, with or without the “www”. Yes, trivial, but you can’t imagine how common it is to find both versions.
Email address, under the same domain as our webs