If you’ve spent any time delving into digital marketing, you’ve probably heard the saying “Content is King” – the old phrase still rings true.

The latest search research reveals that 57% of SEO experts rank content creation and content marketing as the number one way to drive the best results in local SEO. Content marketing is a proven local strategy that gets small businesses noticed in the right places.

Content marketing is one of, if not the, most critical aspects to gaining local visibility.

Producing and publishing content that is both relevant to your niche and your local community can significantly improve your organic search potential. Once you’ve posted content, the hard work does not stop there; content marketing includes regularly updating content, managing content, and optimising the content for better user interaction. Updating existing content with fresh images and written content can increase organic traffic by 111.3%.

According to the latest studies into search, the average page one result in Google contains 1,890 words of content. And while that might seem like a ridiculous amount of writing per page, the focus should be creating location landing pages that will position your business as a local industry leader – not a follower.

Not every page needs to be lengthy; however, on-site content optimization, including competitor and keyword research is crucial to optimizing pages in the right places for the right area. Our SEO services focus on optimizing the right pages, for the right visibility.

Social reviews through Google My Business, Facebook and Yelp are one of the most potent and highly effective ways to enhance user trust and boost conversions.

Working hand in hand with peer reviews and valuable business information, managing and optimising your Google My Business (GMB) is one of the most critical aspects of an effective local SEO strategy.

The latest local SEO statistics revealed that 56% of local businesses are yet to claim their free Google My Business listing.

Given that GMB is one of the first things that customers come across when searching for a company online, having the right information is imperative to local success. Businesses that verify, manage and optimize their GMB listing are deemed more trustworthy, reliable, and legitimate. Furthermore, GMB is your ticket to getting your business listed in local snack packs – where the most highly motivated local traffic will come across your business.

Earning a healthy backlink profile is an integral part of a comprehensive SEO campaign.

Links signal to search engines that one website considers another website to be trustworthy, authoritative, and insightful. Links coming from relevant and high authority websites also provide increased brand awareness, referral traffic, and can directly enhance the visibility of a website.

Where ten years ago link building solely focused on getting as many backlinks as possible, link building today is much more organic, relevant, and meaningful. Google’s Penguin update back in 2012 put an end to link schemes in an effort to halt high masses of link building for improved search visibility.

SEO is constantly evolving, and as a result, the weight that is given to backlinks will often fluctuate. However, it is undeniable that backlinks continue to play an enormous role in search engine visibility – the secret is to continue working with Google’s sophisticated and evolving webmaster guidelines.

Today, marketers need to make sure they are building clean, sustainable links that will remain safe and unaffected through Google’s future algorithm shifts.

The key to sustaining a backlink profile that is valuable for local SEO is to earn and acquire backlinks that are local, relevant, and meaningful. By creating potent and relevant connections with local businesses in your area, backlinks become an important way to acquire lucrative referral traffic and signal to search engines the value of your website within your local community.

At Flyserp Digital, we focus our local SEO services and backlink building efforts on working with relevant, local sources that are going to boost the local authority and trustworthiness of your website.

A variety of technical SEO factors can influence how your website performs in search engine result pages.

Pinpointing, addressing and rectifying any existing technical SEO problems is crucial for any effective SEO campaign.

Some of the most common technical SEO factors that we review and promptly address include (but are not limited to):

• Hosting suitability
• Website speed and page load time
• Broken backlinks
• HTTPS status and SSL security layer
• Website crawlability
• Sitemap
• Broken pages
• Duplicate content issues (on-site + competitors)
• Structured data (schema mark-up)
• Broken internal links
• Robots.txt file settings

These are just a few of the most common technical SEO concerns that we assess. In general, we solve all outstanding technical problems within the first month of an SEO campaign. In exceptional circumstances, we may take a couple of months to rectify all outstanding technical concerns.

Where one aspect of links in SEO focuses on getting other websites to link to your pages, internal linking revolves around linking between pages within a domain to create a hierarchy for your content.

Strategic internal linking is an essential SEO tool that webmasters have complete control over for optimization.

Creating a hierarchy between pages signifies to crawlers which pages are most relevant, important, and valuable. This will help search engines to identify which content should be displayed on search engines and where. Optimizing your internal linking structure can go a long way in improving search visibility.

Page titles, or title tags, provide one of the most potent relevancy signals for search engines.

When it comes to local search engine optimisation; title tags should be location-specific and give an accurate and short summary of the page’s purpose. Using the relevant keywords and locations will ensure that search engines are aware of your local relevancy.

In addition to being an important on-page ranking factor, optimised page titles can also have a considerable influence on how pages perform in the search engine result pages with user interaction. Providing clients with search engine marketing services, we have seen significant impacts just by optimising page titles for organic search.

One of the most critical aspects of implementing local marketing services is targeting local areas with location-specific pages.

According to the latest SEO statistics, 78% of users who make a search that includes location information will then carry out transactions in a physical store. If you want to get your business noticed in your local area, you need to put the effort in to target the area with attractive location-specific landing pages.

Web directories are used as online catalogues for website and businesses.

In the past, they have had a significant place in organic SEO to build a solid foundation for backlinks and NAP consistency. However, utilising spammy directories today for masses of links will only get your website into trouble.

The big takeaway from directory listings is that they really do not hold much weight in local search marketing today. Using legitimate high-quality and reputable directories is fine – as long as they are focused on providing NAP consistency and not masses of low-quality backlinks.