If you are a local business, you rely mostly on customers and leads nearby. For example, if you are a restaurant in New York, you are targeting New Yorkers and New York tourists, not Californians.
Optimizing your online presence to your region or city so you are easily found by these nearby potential customers is called local SEO. But do you know that you can optimize down to very specific localities, like neighborhoods, blocks, and even particular streets? This is called hyperlocal SEO.
Here’s everything you need to know about hyperlocal SEO as a local business.
Table of contents
- What is hyperlocal SEO, exactly?
- What are the most effective hyperlocal SEO strategies?
- How do you choose a hyperlocal SEO provider?
What is hyperlocal SEO, exactly?
Hyperlocal SEO is about optimizing your online presence for a specific neighborhood, town, or even street. The point is that it’s hyper-specific compared to traditional SEO and local SEO. Take a look at these keywords as an example:
- Keywords: Coffee shop
- Local SEO keywords: Coffee shop New York City
- Hyperlocal SEO keywords: Coffee shop East Village New York City
By being hyper-specific, you improve your online visibility within a very small geographical radius and attract potential customers already within this area. Here are the incredible benefits of hyperlocal SEO:
- Hyperlocal SEO improves visibility and relevance. Optimize your business for hyperlocal SEO keywords to increase your business’s visibility in hyperlocal search results. This makes it easier for potential customers in the area to see your products and services. It also helps search engines give relevant results to searchers. For example, when a searcher types “coffee shops near me” and you are a coffee shop in the area, the search engine is more likely to show your business when you are hyperlocal SEO optimized.
- It gives you targeted traffic. Target hyperlocal SEO keywords and optimize for very specific geographical areas to attract potential customers who are already looking for the products and services you are offering. These potential customers are targeted traffic. They are more likely to reach out to you, engage with your content, ask questions, and ultimately, convert themselves into real paying customers. Your hyperlocal SEO investment can give you good ROI.
- It boosts your local reputation. Execute the most effective hyperlocal SEO strategies like Google Business Profile optimization and hyperlocal citation building. This way, you boost your business’s reputation in the locality. These strategies also give you a competitive advantage since not all businesses in your area are optimizing for hyperlocal SEO. It may be easier to rank hyper-locally than you think.
What are the most effective hyperlocal SEO strategies?
There are many strategies you can execute to optimize for hyperlocal SEO. It’s a good idea to use all of them, or at least a multiple of them, to make your business very competitive in the hyperlocal scene.
These strategies are basically just the same as local SEO strategies. The difference is that they are more optimized for more specific areas and keywords.
1. Hyperlocal keyword research
Hyperlocal keyword research is about identifying highly specific keywords that are relevant to your business and immediate geographical area. It’s the backbone of all hyperlocal SEO strategies. Without these keywords, your hyperlocal optimizations can be directionless and ineffective.
When done effectively, hyperlocal keyword research enhances visibility and relevance in your industry and immediate geographical area, whether that area is a neighborhood, street, or even a specific building. The increase in visibility leads to more eyes and more likely conversions. And the increase in relevance even further boosts the chance of conversions.
Here are the steps to do hyperlocal keyword research:
- Identify target locations: Know the specific geographical areas where your potential customers are, so you know the areas to optimize for.
- Find location-specific keywords: Compile a list of keywords within the specific geographical areas’ vicinity, including neighborhoods, landmarks, streets, specific buildings, and other identifiable markers.
- Study hyperlocal search trends: Use keyword research tools to identify hyperlocal search terms and study their search volumes, competition, performance, and potential for driving traffic to your online channels.
- Optimize for your chosen keywords: Once you have identified the keywords you should target, optimize for them via your other hyperlocal SEO strategies, such as Google Business Profile optimization and hyperlocal content creation. This is why hyperlocal keyword research is an extremely important step. It’s often a prerequisite for other hyperlocal SEO strategies.
- Monitor hyperlocal performance: Track the performance of your hyperlocal optimizations via analytics tools. These tools can measure changes in search rankings, traffic across your online channels, and even conversion rates. You can adjust your hyperlocal SEO strategies and executions based on the data you collect and analyze.
2. Google Business Profile optimization
Google Business Profile optimization is about creating, enhancing, and managing your Google Business Profile listing. The Google Business Profile is a Google-owned platform where businesses can provide accurate information about their company, such as their business name, address, phone number, and more.
By optimizing your Google Business Profile listing, you are giving both potential customers and search engines accurate business information. This improves visibility and brand awareness. By enhancing and managing your listing, you can also improve credibility, engage with customers, and more. There are just so many things you can do with the Google Business Profile, such as creating posts and updates and replying to customer reviews.
Here are the steps to hyperlocal optimize your Google Business Profile listing:
- Claim and verify your listing: Visit the Google Business Profile platform and claim ownership of your business there. Just follow the verification process provided by Google. Claiming and verifying your listing is essential as it lets you access and manage your profile.
- Provide accurate business information: Add all the necessary business information to your Google Business Profile listing. The most important ones are your business name, address, and phone number. But don’t disregard other important business information, such as operating hours and website URLs.
- Further optimize your profile: In the platform, there are categories you can choose from to let Google understand your business more. Take advantage of these categories. Also, further optimize your profile by writing compelling business descriptions and adding high-quality photos.
- Use the platform’s additional features: The Google Business Profile platform allows you to write posts. This is a great opportunity for your business to create engaging content, talk about your products and services, and share updates about your company and its offerings. The platform also allows customers to leave reviews. Reply professionally and promptly to all reviews, including negative ones, to show your customer commitment. The Google Business Profile platform has a lot of features to offer. Make sure to utilize them to maximize the use of the platform.
- Adjust your optimization strategy when necessary: The platform also shares analytics and insights. Adjust your Google Business Profile optimization strategy and execution based on the data you see.
3. Hyperlocal citation building
Citations are mentions or references to your business from directories like the Google Business Profile platform, websites like blogs, and social media platforms like Facebook. They typically include your business name, address, phone number, and other relevant details. You can build citations that are hyper-locally relevant.
These citations improve your digital footprint. They build authority, increase visibility, and give you traffic and leads through the mentions and references from various platforms.
Here’s how you do hyperlocal citation building:
- Identify hyper-locally relevant platforms: The biggest platforms are the likes of Google Business Profile, Foursquare, and Yelp. But try to look for hyper-locally relevant ones, like chamber of commerce websites, local business directories, and neighborhood blogs.
- Submit your business and its details to the platforms: After identifying the platforms where you can build hyperlocal citations, reach out to them and send your business and its details. Different platforms will have different processes. For example, if it’s a directory, you may need to claim and verify the listing on your own. But if it’s a neighborhood blog, you may need a more personal collaboration to get citations from the webmaster.
- Ensure consistency in your business information: Your hyperlocal citation building efforts are useless if you are building with inaccurate and inconsistent business information. Make sure that the business information you are submitting is accurate and consistent throughout different platforms.
- Seek and build local partnerships: Mentions from websites like blogs and social media posts like tweets can be difficult to acquire. You give your business more chances of success by reaching out and trying to build real partnerships with local players, like relevant communities and influencers.
- Continuously monitor your hyperlocal citations: Business changes, platform updates, and other developments can lead to changes to your business information. This is why it’s important to continuously monitor your hyperlocal citations to ensure that they are accurate, consistent, and up-to-date.
4. Hyperlocal link building
Hyperlocal link building is about getting backlinks from websites and other online platforms that are relevant to the local area or neighborhood you are targeting. These backlinks can come from hyper-locally relevant directories, local news websites, neighborhood blogs, and more.
They are basically “votes” for your business. The better quality and numerous votes you have, the better you are viewed by potential customers and search engines.
Build hyperlocal backlinks with these steps:
- Identify hyperlocal link opportunities: Look for local websites, blogs, and other similar platforms that are relevant to your business and immediate geographical area. You can get links from them using different link building strategies, such as guest posting.
- Create compelling content: You don’t necessarily have to reach out to acquire links. Sometimes, you can build links too organically by creating linkable content. Develop content that is tailored to your hyperlocal audience’s concerns, needs, and other interests. They could be industry-specific resources, local guides, or anything that your audience may find useful. The best area to start hyperlocal content creation and link building is your business website.
- Reach out to hyper-locally relevant platforms: Building links organically is great. But building links manually and proactively is even better. Reach out to the online channels you have discovered to have link opportunities and ask for links. It’s better if you can give something of value in return, like a guest post.
- Look for opportunities in gatherings: Events where potential customers, influencers, fellow business owners, and other relevant players in the local scene are great places to build relationships and experience benefits like backlinks. When attending these events, don’t just give them elevator pitches. Genuinely be interested and form relationships.
- Analyze your results: There are many tools you can use to audit, study, or view your backlink profile and see the performance of your hyperlocal link building efforts. Analyze the data you see and adjust your efforts accordingly.
5. Hyperlocal content creation
Hyperlocal content creation is about creating content that is hyper-locally relevant. This kind of content is designed to resonate with local audiences by addressing their needs and wants, interests, and concerns.
This hyperlocal SEO strategy is great because it helps build your business’s local authority and reputation. After all, if you talk about locally relevant topics, you become a local resource that locals can trust and value. This strategy is just great for generating traffic and improving engagement.
Follow this step-by-step process for hyperlocal content creation:
- Research local keywords, topics, and trends: Know what search terms your local audience uses. Stay informed about local developments such as topics and trends you can ride to get more eyeballs to your business locally.
- Create engaging and informative content: With your research data in consideration, create different kinds of content. Your content should be engaging and informative to give it more push. This is why many businesses just outsource content creators like writers, copywriters, graphic artists, and video editors.
- Sprinkle the keywords on your content: Take the keywords you have identified during your research and incorporate them into your content. Keywords, phrases, and geographic terms improve your local search rankings.
- Promote your content locally: Share your hyperlocal content across your online channels, like your website, social media profiles, and your Google Business Profile listing. You can also promote on channels where the local audiences are, such as your email newsletter or local content forums.
- Try different content formats and distribution channels: Like the other hyperlocal SEO strategies, you need to use tools to monitor and analyze your efforts when it comes to hyperlocal content creation. Based on your analysis, adjust your content formats and distribution channels to improve in key performance indicators like engagement metrics and website traffic. Don’t be afraid to experiment as well.
How do you choose a hyperlocal SEO provider?
You can do hyperlocal SEO in-house. But this can take a lot of money and time – resources that you could be dedicating to other aspects of your business like product development and customer service. You can outsource your SEO needs to providers like SEO agencies and freelancers.
To choose a competent hyperlocal SEO provider, follow these tips:
- Look at their expertise and experience. Make sure that your provider actually knows how to pull off hyperlocal SEO. Usually, providers will have resources on their websites to show their expertise and experience. These resources can come in the form of case studies, portfolios, reviews, and testimonials.
- Get a feel of their reputation. Hyperlocal SEO is also about reputation management. Why would you hire someone with a terrible reputation to handle your local reputation? Hire someone who is already known. Look at their SEO game in their own online channels. And then study if they are viewed positively by their clients, peers, and potential customers.
- Check for customization and flexibility options. Make sure that your chosen hyperlocal SEO provider meets your unique preferences and requirements. After all, different businesses have different needs and wants. Get someone with customizable and flexible pricing options and strategies.
Make your business locally competitive with hyperlocal SEO
Hyperlocal SEO is a powerful way to make your business visible and competitive in very specific geographic locations, like neighborhoods, streets, and even specific buildings. Optimize hyper-locally using a variety of techniques like Google Business Profile optimization. And before you know it, you are ranking for very specific keywords and phrases like “Coffee shop East Village New York City.”
Yes, you can do hyperlocal SEO in-house, but you will have to build and train a team. You can also just outsource to hyperlocal SEO providers like Marketer’s Center to save money and time – resources you can dedicate to other parts of your business like product development and customer service.
