Are you interested in improving your local SEO? If so, use the proven and practical tips described here.

Virtually every transaction begins with a search.

It doesn’t matter if someone wants to order food, buy groceries, purchase new clothes, or something else, most of them start with a digital approach. Of all these searches, approximately 46% are for local businesses.

Now, it’s up to you to figure out how you can rank for these local searches. Investing in local SEO solutions will meet this need.

Optimizing your search efforts for a local audience uses the same strategies that organic search does. The difference is that you focus on people in your local area – the customers who are most likely going to come to your store and make direct, physical contact with your business.

If you are ready to improve your local SEO efforts, try some of the tips found here.

SEO audits let you see the overall health of your website. It will reveal any technical issues that affect the rankings and the recommended fixes based on what is found.

When working to optimize your website for local search, a local SEO audit may be more effective than a general one. That’s because it will dive deeper into the elements that affect search result performance on a local scale. Some of the information a local SEO audit can help with include competition analysis, on-page SEO performance, backlinks analysis, and social signals.

An essential local SEO tip to follow is to see what keywords your site is currently ranking for. When you invest in keyword research, you can find new opportunities that help your site appear more often when someone searches for what you offer.

One of the fastest ways to optimize your site for local SEO is by including a location with your keyword. For example, if you own a hardware store in Atlanta, consider the keywords your customers are most likely to use. You can also find keyword ideas to look at and see what terms are being used in community forums. After all, if people are talking about something, there is a good chance they are searching for information on it, too. These can be your new keywords.

After choosing the keywords for your local SEO campaign, you need to use them in your site’s content. Ideally, you should create content for each of the geo-targeted keywords you have selected. The content should support these keywords, which is why you need to localize the content you are creating.