If you’re running a local business, it’s crucial to ensure your website is correctly optimized for local search.
One of the most critical aspects of local SEO is writing adequate metadata. This blog post will discuss the three main goals you should aim to achieve with your metadata.
We’ll also provide some tips on how to write compelling titles and descriptions for optimizing location pages. Follow these tips, and you’ll be well on your way to ranking higher in local search results!
When it comes to local SEO, metadata is one of the most critical factors you can focus on.
The goal is to be found for your services in your target locations.
When writing titles and meta descriptions for the pages on our local business website, we have three main goals we want to achieve:
- Accurately describe the contents of our page(s).
The first goal you should aim to achieve with your metadata is to describe your page’s contents accurately. Make sure your titles and descriptions are relevant to the content on your pages.
This will help search engines understand what your pages are about, which can help improve your rankings in local search results.
- Make them enticing to potential customers.
The second goal is to make your titles and descriptions enticing to potential customers. Make sure your metadata is catchy and compelling and accurately reflects your business’s unique content and selling proposition.
This will help you stand out from the competition and attract more visitors to your website.
- Use keywords strategically within these tags so that visitors looking for those keywords are attracted to our site.
The third goal is to use keywords strategically in your titles and descriptions.
Relevant keywords
Please make sure the keywords you use are relevant to the content on your pages and that they are used to attract visitors who are looking for those specific keywords. This will help improve your rankings in local search results and bring more potential customers to your website.
If you focus on these three goals, you’ll be well on your way to improving your local SEO ranking!
Page level vs. Inline
Page-level metatags are one of the most critical factors in local SEO. It’s not enough to use keywords; you need to write them in a way that attracts visitors and gets them excited about your business.
Page-level metadata is one of the most critical factors in local SEO because it helps search engines understand what your pages are about, improving your rankings in local search results. However, it’s also essential to make sure that your metadata is appealing to potential customers and accurately reflects the unique selling proposition of your business.
Finally, it would be best to use keywords strategically to attract visitors looking for those specific keywords. If you follow these tips, you’ll be well on your way to ranking higher in local search results and bringing more potential customers to your website.
Essential metadata for location pages
title
Title tags are one of the most critical aspects of local SEO. Your title should be descriptive, compelling, and catchy.
This will help make your page stand out in search results and attract more visitors to your website! Titles should also include keywords that describe what’s on each page (e.g., “Drink & Food”).
Pro Tip: Use About and Mention schema for niches.
These keywords should be placed near the beginning of your title to give them more weight.
meta description
The meta description is also vital for local SEO. This is the text that appears in search engine results pages under the title of your page.
Make sure this text accurately describes the contents of your page and entices potential customers to click through to your website. Include keywords near the beginning of your description to give them more weight.
This will help attract visitors who are looking for those specific keywords.
meta robots
The meta robots tag is also vital for local SEO. This tag tells search engines whether or not they should index the page, and it can be used to prevent pages from being indexed if necessary.
The most common value of this tag is “index, follow,” which tells search engines to index the page and follow any links on it (default behavior). I’d recommend using this setting for every page except your privacy policy or terms of service pages if you’re running a local business.
You can use the meta robots tag to prevent these pages from being indexed, which will help keep your website’s structure intact.
json+ld schema
Learn more about schema for location pages.
Other meta tags that may be useful for local SEO
canonical URL
The canonical URL tag is used to identify a preferred version of a page. This tag can be used to avoid duplicate content issues, and it can help improve the rankings of pages that are similar to each other.
This tag should be used on pages that are duplicates of each other (e.g., your home page and about page). The canonical URL for a page should always be the page’s original version, not a copy or variation.
Googlebot
The Googlebot tag tells search engines which user agent they should use when crawling your website. This tag can be used to specify different settings for different devices (e.g., desktop, mobile, etc.).
This tag is helpful if you want to provide different site versions for other devices. For example, you could set up one version for desktop computers and another for mobile devices.
This is helpful because it allows users to see different content based on what device they’re using.
nofollow
The nofollow tag tells search engines not to follow links from that page. This can be used if you want certain site pages not to be crawled by search engines.
You can use this tag on any page that doesn’t add value to your website (e.g., blog comments, guestbook entries). It’s generally considered a good practice to use the nofollow attribute for these links because they don’t provide much value in terms of SEO anyways.
publisher
The publisher tag is used to identify the owner of a website. Search engines can use this tag to determine which results are relevant for specific queries. For example, if you own both MyCompany.com and MyOtherCompany.com, then using this tag will help ensure that your pages show up when people search for your company name.
This tag should be added to every page on your website, as it will help ensure that all of your pages are indexed by Google and Bing (which is the case if you have a sitemap file).
language
The language tag tells search engines what language each page of your website is written in. This tag can improve the rankings of pages targeted towards a specific language and help search engines understand what language a page is written in.
This tag should be added to every page on your website to clarify which one is the original version (which will help avoid duplicate content issues).
rating
The rating tag indicates whether or not a page contains adult content. This can be useful for improving the rankings of pages targeted towards adults (e.g., dating sites, gambling sites, etc.).
It can also help search engines understand what type of content they’re looking at (which could potentially improve the rankings of those pages). This tag should be added to any page that contains adult content so that search engines know what type of content they’re looking at (which could improve the rankings of those pages).
robots
The robot’s meta tag is used to tell search engines how you want them to handle a specific page on your website. This can be used to specify whether search engines should index a page or not (i.e., should they show it in their results), as well as whether or not the links on that page are followed by those search engines when crawling your site?
This tag should be added to every page on your website to control how search engines handle that page altogether.
revisit-after
The revisit-after meta tag tells search engines how often they should visit a page on your website to keep it fresh in their index. This can help improve the rankings of pages that are updated frequently (e.g., news sites, blogs, etc.).
This tag should be added to pages that are updated frequently so that search engines know how often they should visit those pages.
sitemap
The sitemap meta tag is used to tell search engines where they can find your website’s sitemap file. This file contains information about the pages on your website, how often they’re updated, and how important each one is compared to others (which can impact rankings).
This tag should be added to any page with a sitemap file associated with it, so search engines know where they need to go if they want more information about those pages.
By following these tips, you can ensure that your metadata is effective for local SEO
Writing compelling titles and descriptions can be tricky, but it’s well worth the effort if you want to rank higher in local search results.
So get started today.
- title: “Write Effective MetaData for Local SEO: The Three Main Goals to Achieve.”
- meta description: “Make sure your website is properly optimized for local search with these tips on writing effective metadata. Includes tips on titles, descriptions, and keywords.”
- keywords: “local SEO, metadata, title tags, descriptions.”
- h tag: “Local SEO Metadata Tips and Tricks.”
- author: “First Last.”
- publisher: “Company.”
- date: “January 31, 2022.”
- guid: “09631/local-seo-metadata/”