In general, Local SEO is a technique or strategy to attract local businesses using the searches made on search engines. In other words, optimization of search engines locally to boost the ranking of your business online. Local SEO is one of the existing off-site SEO techniques that are needed for any online businesses.

Aspiring candidates looking for jobs or small startup companies that depend on small agencies to hire a candidate, search recruitment agencies from their phones, tablets etc. In case of searches like these, search engines give preference to the local businesses that are listed in the database of the search engines.

The most important thing while establishing a local business is to build your citations right. Citations are the references to your Name, Address and Phone Number and if you have a website, then the Web address or URL of the website.

Imagine a situation where you are looking for an employment agency for some urgent recruitment and name, address or phone numbers are missing for some of them. Would you prefer to return to them in future? The answer is NO. To build the trust of prospective clients and let them contact you physically, you have to list your name address and phone number correct online.

Once listing update, upload and creation are done, it is time to verify what has been done. Even you are managing and updating listings by automated services, there are chances to have a duplicate listing on a single platform. How can this happen? Search engines’ algorithms take even a single data change in two uploads, as another listing.

This way there will be two listings in the name of your company with the smallest change of data. This will create confusion among customers and you’ll lose the trust of your clients potentially.

Believe or not, local reviews are very important for a business like employment services. Both, positive and negative reviews are equally important for establishing your clientele. 90% of the starches converted to potential businesses after seeing positive reviews and ratings online.

You can use strategies like asking your existing customers for writing reviews, prizes or discount coupons for writing a review etc. to encourage them to write a review and give ratings for your business.

After the listings and reviews, the platform people depend to talk about a local a business is web and social media. Creating web presence is very important these days as everyone uses internet and some platform or the other 24*7. So, if you have a good reputation and visibility online, you will double your chances to get businesses locally.

Remember, the Google My Business listing is available free of cost. You should take advantage of this fact and see to it that you have a listing. Claiming the GMB listing is easy. Follow the simple procedure as listed below,

• Visit the official website of Google My Business

• You have to fill up a simple form giving details of your business

• Filling up will not take more than a couple of minutes

• Ensure to choose the right category as otherwise you would end up in a wrong directory.

• Enter the landline phone number and not the toll-free numbers

• Submit the information

Every person is active on social media today. It makes sense to have an exclusive social media campaign working in your favor. That should not be a tough task considering the ease with which people interact on social media.

This is still the best way for you to reach the maximum number of customers across all criteria. You have the facility of exchanging views, opinions, messages, and other types of information with ease. Messages can spread like wildfire on social media. The reach is tremendous. This is a great tool for global SEO search, but is equally effective for local SEO search as well.

Remember not to get embroiled in Black Hat SEO techniques. Steer clear of them. Seek backlinks from authority websites like the .gov and .edu websites. One of the easiest ways to do so is to contribute to these websites by way of informative and entertaining blogs. You can get valuable backlinks from such websites. One such backlink is better than a 100 cheap backlinks.

You have seen a lot of promotional activities that can help you announce your presence in the market. Is this enough for you to rank high on the SERPs? It is not. You need a strong on-page SEO campaign as well to supplement the off-page SEO efforts. Let us look at some on-page SEO tactics.

Use your keywords with care. There can be temptation to stuff your keywords into the content. Be as natural as possible while using the keywords. Google takes strong objections to keyword stuffing. They do not hesitate to flag down websites that adopt such practices.

Use localized keywords as much as possible. A person residing in New York is definitely not going to search for a nightclub in Washington DC unless he is present in Washington DC at that time. Local SEO demands localized keywords for optimization.