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A Simple Local SEO Checklist That All Website Owners Should Follow
Local SEO can be a critical connector for many businesses as people in your area are looking for providers. Are your businesses show up when they search for your main location?
Local SEO empowers your brand to target geo-specific keywords and win over customers within a geographical region. Optimize your online presence so your company is ever-present in top Google searches and featured in high-value business directories.
A Simple Local SEO Checklist:
- Know your ranking factors
- Optimize your domain
- Optimize Google My Business
- Get social
- Encourage user reviews
- Generate backlinks and traffic
- Mobile usability
1. Know your ranking factors
- Link Signals
- On-page signals
- Behavioral signals
- Google My Business Signals
- Personalization
- Review Signals
- Social Signals
2. Optimize your domain
Run a site crawl to purge the following issues:
- Duplicate Content
- Broken Links
- Accessibility
- Indexability
- Missing Metadata
- Zombie Pages
Update:
- Title tags
- Images
- Navigation
- URL Strings
- NAP data(Contact information)
- Structured data markup
- Keyword targets
3. Optimize Google My Business
- Create Google My Business Profile.
- Allow Google to publicly display your business information.
- Enter geographical radius.
- Select primary and secondary business categories.
- Write a short business description.
- upload visual content.
- Verify Google My Business account Ownership.
- Solicit customer reviews and Questions.
- Create content with Google posts
4. Get social
Target channels, directories, and publications that are most relevant to your customers, your services, and your location. Those might be:
- Snapchat
- Yelp
- TripAdvisor
- Yellow Pages
- MapQuest
- Better Business Bureau
Each Industry has its own high-value forums that are hyper-targeted to niche buyers. That’s where you need to be as well.
5. Encourage user reviews
- Leave a simple review request on checkout pages.
- Add links to directories on your site.
- Add alt text to images you upload to directories so they appear in SERPs.
- Ask user-experience questions after every transaction, either on site or via email.
- Embed reviews and rating systems on your site.
- Put a Google My Business review request in your email signature.
- Stay in top brand alerts and commentary across social media.
6. Generate backlinks and traffic
- Publish localized content built around geo-targeted keywords.
- Use lots of visuals and location-specific phrasing on your domain and social channels.
- Connect with and incentivize high-value local influencers.
- Partner with other local establishments or peer organizations for co-branding campaigns.
- Use a brand monitoring tool to be alerted when your company name is mentioned across the web. Reach out to those mentioning you.
7. Mobile usability
- Use Google’s mobile-friendly test to achieve optimal mobile responsiveness.
- Remove Mobile site errors.
- Format content with a mobile user in mind.
- Make site navigation easy and enable one-click phone calls from touchscreen devices.
Seriously Local SEO is so important.
How to improve your Email Marketing Performance?
While social media platforms have seen increased usage over time, email remains a critical connector for business, providing a direct line to your potential customers where you can promote your latest offerings in a targeted, timed, and essentially freeway. Basically, if you’re looking to maximize your marketing efforts, email needs to play a part.
So how can you improve your Email Marketing process?
According to statistics, 306.4 billion emails were sent and received each day in 2020. In 2024, the figure is expected to shoot to 361.6 billion. But this also poses a burning problem for email marketers – the problem of plenty.
With so many emails flowing into the subscriber’s inbox every day, subscribers are not reading but scanning them. In fact, the average time spent by a subscriber on an email has decreased by 12% from 2018.
- In 2018, the average time spent reading email is 13.4 seconds
- In 2020, the average time spent reading email is 11.82 seconds
A Good email design hand-holds a reader. Guides their reading flow, keeping them engaged. Feeds them the crux of your email campaign.
When your subscribers check their email inbox, there are three things they see:
- From Name
- Subject Line
- Preheader Text
These three aspects determine whether your email is opened or ignored.
1. Identifiable From Name
Keep your brand name as your From Name for instant recognition.
2. Captivating Subject Line
Craft a crisp, Personalized, intriguing subject line. However, make sure it conveys the purpose of your email and is NOT misleading.
You can always experiment with emojis to bring life to the inbox.
The sweet spot for the length of your subject line? 65 Characters.
3. Informative Preheader
- An extension of your subject line and a prelude to your email content, the preheader, again, must be crisp, further introducing the reader to the purpose of your email.
- Considering the space available on mobile devices for this text, 30-55 characters work well.
- Do check your subject line and preheader in all email clients before hitting send to ensure the text does not get too long.
- Add a ‘View Online‘ link in the preview text.
The Responsive Design Best practices
39% email consumption happened on mobile devices in 2020. While there has been a dip in mobile opens from 42% in 2019, this is still a huge number. Your emails, thus, have to be responsive.
- Stick to a single-column layout.
- Keep the title font-size 22px or more. The copy line width should be up to 6 words of 12-14px font size; the size is ideal for both desktop and mobile. Keep line spacing around 1.5 times the font size.
- Apple recommends a minimum of 44*44 pixels for your CTA button. As far as the font size of your CTA Button is concerned, a good rule of thumb is to use 16px or more.
Making Emails Accessible
2.2 billion people worldwide have some form of vision impairment. It is thus crucial to follow email accessibility best practices to make your emails inclusive for one and all.
- Give a logical reading order to your email by assembling the content from left to right and from top to bottom.
- Use Headers to help your subscribers using screen readers to clearly understand the hierarchy.
- Use ALT Text for images as those screen readers will listen to your ALT Text.
- Avoid center-aligned copy as people with dyslexia may find it difficult to read.
- As mentioned earlier, your CTA button size should be 44*44 px and the size of the text should be 16 px or more.
- 5% of the world population is color blind. So, mindful use of colors and contrast is essential. Make sure to include a contrast between text color and the email background color.
Follow these Email design best practices and we bet your email templates will not only pleasantly surprise your subscribers but also yield the ROI you are looking at.