Updated December 2018.

Note: Looking for an actionable Local SEO Checklist for 2018? At the end of this post, you can download a PDF that distills all the important points into checklist items. You can also watch our in-depth video below.

“I know I need to work on SEO for my business’s website, but there’s so much to do and learn and I don’t know where to start.”

If that’s something you’ve said (or found yourself thinking), then this blog post is for you!

We want to de-mystify this arcane art of search engine optimization. We’re doing that by giving you a checklist-style guide to the main things you should be concerned about when it comes to SEO for your local business.

First off, here’s the big picture as a series of straightforward bullet points:

The Local SEO Checklist

1. Find the keywords you want to target and rank for.
2. Use your keywords for effective onsite optimization.
3. Update your site to use SSL.
4. Proactively work on link building.
5. Get your Google My Business page up to date and ask for Google reviews.
6. Create, post, and promote unique, high-quality, original content.
7. Use website analytics to measure your results.
8. Have a snappy and responsive mobile site that loads quickly.

Now we’ll take a look at each of these items, and explain how you can take practical steps to improve your business’s SEO.

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Your local business should have a blog; it demonstrates expertise, builds trust with potential customers, and helps you rank higher on search engines.

Maybe you added a “Blog” section to your WordPress site, but there’s nothing living there except the default “Hello World” post. Maybe you started out writing a post every week, but it’s fizzled out because you couldn’t maintain that posting schedule. After all, when you’re running a local business, you’ve got much higher priorities than writing articles, right?

Maybe you never even bothered with the whole blog thing, and you haven’t touched your website since your nephew set it up for you last year. Whatever your situation, we want you to understand that blogging is actually crucial for your business.

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UPDATE: Never ever ever buy Yelp ads!

ORIGINAL POST: We are constantly amazed at the animosity Yelp inspires among business owners we talk to. They frequently bring it up to us unprompted or fly into a mini-rage when we mention the “Y” word. Terms like “shakedown,” “scam” and “the devil” arise commonly enough that the company might want to take notice. (From the conversations we’ve had with Yelp, they don’t plan on changing anything.)

Once the curses have mostly passed, it’s then our unfortunate job as a Madison SEO company to tell businesses they should capitalize on Yelp anyway, however bad the blood. This doesn’t always go over well, and we’ve actually been told this is a non-starter: that the business has been burned so badly they don’t even want to deal with Yelp.

So what’s going on that business owners resent this top online business directory that is almost a search engine in its own right?

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Why ask for Google reviews and how many should I have?

Five (UPDATE: Three) is the magic number when it comes to reviews on your Google Local or Google My Business (GMB) page. That’s because once you have 5 reviews, Google shows your star rating visually to potential customers on Google Maps and in the result page 3-pack. Something about seeing stars just makes a person want to click and check out that business.

Not having those stars when other businesses do just makes it look like you’re lacking somehow. And you are, really, because you should regularly be using social proof (like testimonials and reviews) to sell to your future customers. Anybody can say their own company is great, but new customers are more likely to believe your past customers.

How do I get more reviews on Google?

So how do you encourage your customers to leave you reviews on Google? There’s no obvious link URL like there is for your main website.

Fortunately, someone has made it easy by creating a tool. Check out how it works in our YouTube video here.

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