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If you market a business that serves a specific geographic area, search optimization involves tasks beyond standard SEO best practices. WordPress local SEO is the process of optimizing a WordPress site and off-site elements like your Google Business Profile. The goal is to give search engines the information they need to understand where your business is, what it does, and to whom it is relevant.
In this article, we’ll show you how to lay the groundwork for local SEO for WordPress and explore tools that can streamline the optimization process.
For local SEO to be effective, you should first have the fundamentals in place. Even if you do everything right from a local optimization perspective, your WordPress site won’t rank if it lacks relevant keyword-optimized content or offers users a poor experience.
We’ve covered WordPress SEO basics in detail elsewhere, but here are some of the most important aspects for local SEO.
Google’s Core Web Vitals measure the loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of your website. They directly impact your search rankings and user experience.
Learn more about optimizing for Core Web Vitals.
A well-organized website architecture helps users and search engines navigate your content. Create a hierarchical structure with clear categories and subcategories, use descriptive URLs, and implement strategic internal linking between related pages.
Two-thirds of consumers look up brands and products on mobile devices. The mobile experience is particularly important for local SEO success. Modern WordPress themes cover the basics of responsive design. However, it’s worth using a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to identify potential issues.
Consistent website availability and performance are the bedrock of search optimization. Choose a WordPress hosting provider that offers excellent uptime guarantees and can handle traffic spikes during peak business periods.
Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is the central pillar of local SEO. It’s a Google listing that will help your business to appear in local search results and on Google Maps.
The first step is to claim or create your profile. Visit the Google Business Profile site and follow the verification process so you can manage the listing. Then fill out every section using consistent name, address, and phone (NAP) details. It’s essential to use business information consistently in your profile and on your website.
Here are some tips for getting the most out of your GBP:
If your business serves an area rather than a location, set your GBP up as a service area business and include the regions you serve in addition to your physical address. This applies to, for example, contractors who work on clients’ homes or professionals who travel to their customers’ locations rather than having customers visit a storefront or office.
In addition to setting up your Google Business Profile, you should ensure that your website displays information that reinforces the details on your profile. It’s worth emphasizing again that consistency matters. If your business profile and your site display different information, search engines will be confused, and you may not show up for relevant searches.
Create a page on your site with the same contact information as on your Google Business Profile. Include the business name, its full address, phone number, and email address. If you have multiple locations, create a page for each one.
Adding an interactive Google map to your contact page serves two purposes. It helps visitors find you more easily, and it sends a strong location signal to search engines. One way to do this is to search for your business on Google Maps, click “Share,” then “Embed Map,” and paste the HTML iframe onto your WordPress page. We’ll see an easier method when we discuss local SEO tools.
The goal is to give Google information about your business that may be useful to searchers. That includes business hours, whether you have parking and how much, which areas you serve, and other relevant information.
Even though you’re adding a dedicated contact page, you should also display your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) on every page. The easiest way to do this is to add it to the footer. Most users won’t see the footer, but web crawlers will. If you would like to display location details prominently, add them to the header instead.
LocalBusiness schema markup is structured data that helps search engines understand your site. It also enables rich search results so that your address, phone, and a map can be included in search results.
Much of the following can be automated with the right local SEO plugin. We’ll take a look at some of the best options in the article’s final section.
Your site should have a JSON-LD snippet that defines business information, including its name, address, phone, URL, the business category, and its geographic coordinates.
Local business schema can include more than just basic location details. For example, you can provide business hours, logos, price ranges, business type, area served, and more. It’s worth taking a look at the properties you can include and providing as many of them as possible.
If yours is the sort of business that has reviews or product ratings, you can use schema markup to communicate them to search engines. If you do, they may be displayed in search engine results pages. That’s how some businesses display star ratings under their page in Google search results.
There’s little point adding lots of schema data to your website if it’s incorrect or corrupted in a way that prevents search engines from understanding it. When you add a local business schema to your site, verify it with Google’s Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator to ensure there are no errors. This is a simple process. You just copy your page URL into the tester and then fix any issues that it flags.
As you might expect, to attract local search traffic, you need to target the phrases your customers are searching for. Typically, this means keywords that combine your service plus a location. For example, “plumber in Denver” or “Italian restaurant near downtown Seattle” are common local search patterns that businesses should target.
First, identify local search terms using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. Be sure to include location modifiers like “in New York”. Then, create pages on your site that incorporate these keywords in prominent positions, such as headings and title tags.
There are two basic categories of content you can create. The first are service and product pages. But you should go beyond local landing pages to develop content that establishes you as an authority in your particular community.
Ideas include:
Involving your business in local events and then publicizing them is an excellent way to attract attention to your site. Be sure to relate the content to the services your business offers.
WordPress local SEO can be managed with WordPress’ built-in features and task-specific plugins for schema optimization. But it’s more efficient to install a dedicated SEO plugin that includes local SEO features.
One of the best local SEO plugins for WordPress is Yoast Local SEO, which is included in the Yoast SEO Premium and Yoast WooCommerce SEO bundles. Yoast helps with Google Maps integration, business information management to display details like your address and opening hours consistently, and local SEO schema output.
Other widely used WordPress SEO plugins with local SEO features include Rank Math and All in One SEO.
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