When most people think of local SEO, thoughts turn to Google Business Profile and local citations.

If you have a bricks and mortar locations these “near me” results, are definitely beneficial but on-page optimisation also plays a huge part in creating the signals that are sent to search engines to influence your local rankings.

With shop local being such an important message for many reasons at the moment and the need to be seen even more important than ever before, here’s five on-page optimisation tips from 291 Media to help you boost your local visibility online.

1. Make Sure Your NAP Is Consistent

NAP is an acronym for Name, Address, and Phone Number.

These three simple pieces of information are key to your local SEO strategy.

You should make sure that these details are displayed prominently on your website. Your footer is a great place to put this content as it will then appear on every page of you site. Linking to your Google Map is also a great idea as is displaying your NAP on service area pages and on your contact page.

It’s important that this key business information is the same across all the channels that potential customers could find you online – and anywhere Google may be using it for comparison to ensure its accuracy. This helps search engines crawlers and bots to connect the dots between your all online information.

2. Spruce Up Your On-page Content

Your site content is an opportunity to show your customers and search engines that you are the authority in your area for the service you provide and an expert in your field.

Make it clear why the customer would need your service in that specific area. The more you communication your knowledge and experience, the better your site will be for your customer.

Think about how your customer searches.

If you were looking for your service near you, what terms would you type into a search engine? Would you include your city, or even neighbourhood?

The answers to these questions will help you decide the type of content you need and which keywords to include. These keywords will help you target both combination searches [web designer in Edinburgh] and GPS-based searches [web designer] while sitting in Chicago. This is where the “near me” searches come into play. Google matches the location of the user (using IP or geolocation) with sites for businesses in the area near the user to provide these search results.

3. Optimise Your Header Tags

We know that header tags are important when it comes to SEO. Header tags, if you don’t know, are your H1, H2, H3 etc titles that you add to web pages. By creating local-based service pages, you are adding extra real estate to create highly targeted header tags including local-based keywords + your services. Having great header tags gives both visitors to your site and search engine crawlers a better idea of the overall structure of the page and what to expect as they read through the content.

Tip – remember not to just stuff keywords into the header tags as this will be unnatural to both your visitors and the crawlers. Keep it relevant and natural to read.

4. Internal Linking

This is something a lot of businesses forget to do. Using internal links throughout your website make it clear to your customer and the search engines that you are available to serve customers in that local area and help them learn more about your business easily.

As you are adding city names to your on-page content, you can use them as an anchor link to the service area pages. Think about including links to public transport to your location or other local businesses that you work with.

5. Local Business Schema

Schema markup can help give all search engines a better understanding of your site and your business. The local business schema types include important and relevant information such as addresses, reviews, hours of operation, social media accounts, service area geo-shapes, and departments in your code that may not necessarily live in your on-page content.

This tells the bots and crawlers all about who you are, what you do, where you do it, and why others trust you without cramming it all on a page.

This also gives you a bit more control of the information you are putting out there instead of relying on the search engines to figure out different resources around the internet.