Can you do local SEO Yourself?

Local SEO is just as important as a website’s global reach. A website that’s only accessible to people in a specific geographic area will struggle to gain more visibility online, which means it has a lot of competition from other websites that are available globally. Local SEO attempts to tackle this by making a website more accessible for people who live locally. It does this by incorporating keywords relevant to the location and turning these into anchor text for links pointing towards them on the Internet. You can do local SEO yourself, but this requires specific technical know-how and skills, so it’s not something you should try without the proper resources either.

Educating Your Self on How to Do Local SEO for Your Business

Educating yourself on how to do local SEO for your business is essential so you can effectively see its success. The first step is finding the keywords most relevant to your location. This starts with a keyword research process. Next, you need to find which of these keywords are most frequently searched within the area you’re targeting; you can use Google Keyword Planner. The next step is creating optimized content that targets these keywords and then optimizing it for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. Finally, you build backlinks from websites with high visibility in the targeted area. This blog post discusses the benefits of outsourcing SEO services and how local SEO works to help businesses maintain an authoritative online presence by making their website more accessible for people in the area where they're located.

Challenges of doing Local SEO Yourself

One of the challenges of doing local SEO is that it’s not always easy to determine the keywords most relevant to a specific location. You could hire a professional to help you with this, but if you don’t have the skills or time to do this, then you should outsource your local SEO needs. Many website owners outsource their local SEO efforts because they are overwhelmed by the task and may not be able to meet their goals with in-house capabilities. In contrast, outsourcing your local SEO efforts will provide a way to maintain your website's presence in an area and allow you to focus on other aspects of your business. It doesn’t mean that outsourcing your digital marketing work solves all your problems but allows for greater efficiency and better results.

Why Local SEO is Important

Local SEO is essential because it helps websites that are only accessible to people in a specific area gain more visibility online. This means less competition from global websites, and your website will have a higher chance of being seen by the relevant audience. To do local SEO, you need to be able to use keywords that are relevant to the location and then turn these into anchor text for links pointing towards them on the Internet. For example, if you're targeting a city like Denver, Colorado, you would need to incorporate popular keywords amongst those who live in this city. For instance, Denver restaurants could use terms like "Denver restaurants," "Denver pizza," and "Colorado brewery." You must create content within local interest articles and web page listings using similar phrases. This ensures that your website is included in search engine results pages and other reputable websites. These websites don’t just appear organically without local SEO; they’re not going to rank unless they go through the process of incorporating keywords related to the location into their content and creating listings for their services.

The Cost of Outsourcing

Local SEO Outsourcing local SEO is often the most economical option for small businesses. The cost of outsourcing local SEO can be significantly lower than if you were to do it yourself, and the skill set for this type of marketing isn’t technical. Outsourcing your local SEO efforts allows you to focus more on other aspects of your website, like content and usability. It also saves on developer fees and admin costs, as these are all things that come with outsourcing your local SEO.

Tools and Resources Needs for Local SEO

It would help if you used many tools for local SEO, including a website auditor. A website auditor will help you diagnose your website’s issues and suggest ways to improve them. Many other tools can benefit your local SEO campaign, but the most important ones are a keyword analysis tool and an XML sitemap generator. The keyword analysis tool helps you identify keywords relevant to your local range to create anchor text for links pointing towards them on the Internet. You should also ensure you have an XML sitemap generator ready for your website, as this is essential when ranking on search engines like Google.

Here is a list of tools to help you if you’re interested in doing local SEO yourself.  You may find that it would be cheaper to outsource this service when you factor in the costs associated with this type of marketing. 

Google Analytics and Google Search Console – You might have heard of Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Both of these tools are used by the majority of businesses out there to measure their performance in various categories. Google Analytics is used to track web traffic, while Google Search Console is used to monitor the health of websites and search results.

Diib – Provides one platform to manage all your analytics, gauge your performance, and identify growth opportunities.

Semrush – Provides over 55 tools to help streamline keyword and market research, content, SEO, SERM and SMM, and advertising. 

Yext – Yext has a network of ~200 third-party publishers to push your brand's data to. 

WordPlay – This is a writing app that creates blog articles for you by utilizing artificial intelligence.