Typically when I meet a client and I ask them what would you like to achieve from a Local SEO campaign their answer includes, “I want to rank Position 1 or Page 1”.

Why settle for ranking in position 1 and only attracting 30 – 35% of potential traffic, when you can completely dominate the search results and annihilate your competition.

Local SEO incorporates a mixture of immediate and long term strategies, each providing a benefit during the campaign at different stages, culminating in dominating the above the fold search results

1. Paid Search & Adwords

You don’t have to have the largest budget or the highest bid.

• Properly structured landing page
• Local extensions
• Call extensions
• Sitelinks
• Specific keywords.

Immediate Impact

2. Local Pack

Not all search terms will trigger a local pack, but when they do, you want to make sure your are appearing in the 3 pack.

• Build your local citations
• Build local links to site
• Ask for reviews
• Structured data markup.

Depending on competition local pack position could take 6 – 12 months. This also works in conjunction with organic position.

3. Organic Position

Ranking a site in position 1 organically is undoubtedly the longest part of any campaign and involves a lot of hard work.

Long Term, read more on Top 20 Search Ranking Factors

4. Image Results

Not every search term provides related images, but when they do, you want to have your images appearing.

Make sure your images have related search term titles and related image url. If your platform allows you to add Alt image attributes, use it.

Immediate Impact

Take the time to understand what opportunities are available for each search term and how to leverage these to dominate the entire search results.