5 Common Local SEO Issues And How to Fix Them

Are you hoping to get more clients for your business this year?

SEO and digital marketing are excellent ways to do this, but there are a few things you should know.

Here are 5 of the most common local SEO issues:

1. A Reliance on Traditional Marketing

Many local business owners haven’t yet embraced digital marketing and SEO and are still relying on traditional marketing. 

While local newspaper ads and flyers can sometimes still be effective, there’s a reason why so many businesses are focusing on inbound marketing.

28% of marketers say they’ve reduced their advertising budget to spend more money on digital marketing. And internet advertising is expected to overtake broadcast TV advertising next year.

Unfortunately, some business owners are still going “old school” and haven’t yet implemented an SEO campaign.

If you’re still on the fence about moving into digital marketing, consider the difference between being active and passive in your business.

Traditional marketing is about sending your advertisement into the universe and passively waiting for your audience to come to you.

Digital marketing allows you to reach out and engage with your audience through social media, forums, emails, and more, which is much more active and gives you a wider reach.

2. Duplicate Content Issues

Businesses with multiple locations can find it tricky to create unique, helpful content for all location pages. 

Often these multi-location businesses will use a template format, meaning that most of the pages end up filtered.

Testimonials are a great way to avoid duplicate content SEO issues. Since agents responding to testimonials can use keywords in their responses, the result is a lot of rich, unique content for every location. 

Another good idea is to write out the driving directions to each site. This will be unique as well as helpful to visitors. 

Alternatively, consider creating employee bios at each location, using exciting details about each employee and natural keywords.

3. Internal Linking

Internal linking helps you rank well in search engines and guides your visitors through your site.

It also passes “link juice” between the pages that you deem most important.

When local businesses don’t have enough internal links on their website, some pages may not be “crawled” by Google. This means that they’re invisible to the search engines, and it’s one of the most common SEO issues. 

This is why a regularly updated blog can be great for SEO. You can use it to promote many internal links to help your website outrank your competitors.

When linking between pages, use clever anchor text, and consider what your reader will naturally want to click on next. 

4. Dealing with SEO Issues (and Spammers)

Since SEO is so important and more businesses are jumping on board, business owners are often plagued by search engine gurus and agencies who are just spammers using black hat techniques.

These spammers harass local businesses and promise them a number one ranking on Google. So it’s little wonder some business owners are sticking to traditional marketing.

If you’re seeking help with SEO and digital marketing, don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions. The agency should have a solid reputation with reviews and testimonials and should also be happy to show you examples of some of their results.

5. Failure to Optimize

Many visitors to your website will be using their tablets and smartphones. If you haven’t yet optimized it for these devices, you could be in trouble.

Visitors will quickly leave a frustrating website, and websites that aren’t mobile-friendly simply won’t render correctly.

Many website themes are responsive and will automatically shift to fit any screen size. This will allow visitors to quickly and easily navigate your website on any device.

Read about how to keep your SEO safe and what mistakes to avoid in our other blog post.

Want to learn more about how we can help with your SEO and digital marketing?

Get in touch today.