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Local SEO, rank in your city

The specific tactics that make Google show your business to nearby customers.

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  1. Nail your Google Business Profile first

    Local SEO is 60% Google Business Profile, 40% everything else. If you haven't finished the GMB guide in this playbook, do that first, no local SEO tactic works without a complete profile.

  2. Add your city to your homepage title & H1

    Change your homepage title tag to include city + service: 'Wedding Photography in Austin | Acme Studio'. Add an H1 that names the city clearly. Weirdly effective, most competitors forget.

  3. Create a page per service AND per city

    If you serve 3 cities and offer 4 services, create 12 dedicated pages: /wedding-photography-austin, /wedding-photography-dallas, etc. Google needs a specific page to rank for a specific city+service combo.

  4. Get listed in local citations

    Submit your business to Yelp, Yellow Pages, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Facebook, TripAdvisor (if relevant), and your local Chamber of Commerce. Consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) across all of them is critical.

  5. Get one review a week on Google

    Review recency matters as much as review count. A business getting 4 new reviews a month ranks higher than one with 100 old reviews. Set a weekly reminder.

  6. Add schema markup (or use a plugin)

    Schema is invisible code that tells Google 'I'm a business, my address is X, my hours are Y'. WordPress: use Yoast Local SEO. Shopify/Wix: they add basic schema automatically. Test at schema.org/validator.

  7. Get a link from one local news site

    Sponsor a local little league team, host a workshop, donate to a school, anything that gets your name on your local newspaper's website. One local backlink is worth 50 random ones for local ranking.

That’s the whole thing.

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