How Often Does Local SEO Needs To Be Done in 2023

Each day, local business owners try to improve their budget, and pay only when a service is required, avoiding monthly plans.

As one of the most asked questions by a startup business: “How often does local SEO need to be done?”

To help you as a starter in SEO, or business owner, we will explain to you when and how local SEO needs to be done, to prevent overoptimization, and drops in results.

What to review mostly when doing Local SEO

When reviewing local business websites, the most important factors are the Google Business Profile, citations done on it, website performance, and competitors.

Having these in mind can help you understand how far or close your business is from success, compared to a competitor, who has achieved better results.

Consistent updating of GBP

Google Business Profile is the heart of every successful business strategy. In fact, performing local SEO without a website can still result in raising brand awareness, and product or service selling.

Since GBP requires information based on the business, it acts as a website on its own.

Aside from Google Business Listings, business owners can also resort to Bing Places for Business, and still raise a huge amount of visitors to their local outlets.

The key factor is having a well-optimized Google Business Profile and other listings to reach your local audience.

And to maintain a successful business, posting on your listing, can tremendously improve the user experience, and let your local customers know whenever you have promotions or updates going.

Creation of citations

Citations are the most important factor in upkeeping your Google Business Profile and other listings. They consist of NAP (Name, Address, Phone), which let Google and other search engines verify that you are running a legitimate business.

Keeping your citations up to date with your business is another useful way to earn higher rankings, and update your customers if changes with your address, business name, or phone number occur.

This way, they will not be confused if your business cannot be found, and call in case they have questions.

In fact, if your business changes its physical location, updating all listings, including map pins could save the business reputation, and earn more clients in its new local area.

Monitoring website speed and uptime

Website speed has become a very big ranking factor when it comes to ranking in the local SERPs.

However, the speed of your website can become irrelevant if your website’s uptime is bad. What I mean by uptime, is how long is your website alive, and available to your users.

Considering that most web hosts guarantee an uptime of 99,99% and the time it would take to perform changes or update on your website, it is very likely that competitors may try to steal clients while your website is down.

A beginner’s mistake in updating a website, which I see quite often is the lack of staging and testing updates.

What most people do nowadays is directly perform the updates with no schedules, tests, or even guarantee that their website will be working properly.

Such bold moves could result in a larger downtime, which not only prevents from users browsing your products or services but also prevents search engine bots to crawl your website.

A good way to prevent downtime and be ahead of the game is to set up a staging site for your business, test the new things you wish to add, and schedule downtime for your business, when nobody is active.

Along with that, monitoring website speed and uptime can also benefit your business, and help you migrate your website to a new hosting provider if the current results are not good enough.

For the most optimal speed, and uptime, we recommend migrating to a LiteSpeed web hosting provider, as they offer the best technology, and services nowadays.

Track positions of local keywords

Tracking your keywords positions gives a slight idea of how well your business is performing in the local SERPs. It helps analyze if the description of a product or service has been helpful to your audience.

By using a keyword-tracking tool, a business owner can understand if the keywords targeted on the website a truly the ones, local searchers use.

Most tracking tools provide traffic estimates. So rephrasing some words, and including local search terms can beneficially boost the conversion rates of a business.

A good way to track the traffic, and positions are by using SEO tools, as their estimates are based on hooked Google Analytics accounts. However, these results are just estimates, and for more accurate traffic of a certain keyword, Google Search Console should be used.

It can be very helpful if a business is ranking for search terms in the top 3 results, and if not, SEO tools can still give a slight suggestion until the keyword ranks at the top.

Spy on local competition

Spying on your local competitors can be a great way to understand why their business is successful, and how you can make your own strategy more effective.

Sometimes it is better to copy what others do, rather than pour hundreds down the drain. Especially when you are a newbie, and don’t wish to pay for local SEO strategies.

To spy on a local competitor, you can use a local SEO tool, and plug your competitors into your tracking list.

For example, Ubersuggest lets business owners add and track competitors. Once the competitor list is completed, the results of the keywords gap, rankings, and backlink profiles will immediately appear.

If your local competitors have more keywords, backlinks, or even shares than you, then it’s time to create more pages, target the same search terms, and share them with your audience.

How long does Local SEO take?

Local SEO can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, or even months, depending on the quality of your website and its content.

If you have just started a new website for your business, be prepared to hit the Google sandbox phase, where you will need to concentrate on the content.

For websites that have entered the sandbox, the time to see your first keyword rankings can be around 2 to 4 months, after publishing consistently and working on your backlink profile.

However, if you have a local authority website, which has been around for years, it can take anywhere from a few days to weeks, to see your local SEO strategy giving results.

As we all know, SEO doesn’t happen overnight, and changing regularly can seriously impact the ranking decision from search engines.

How often should local SEO be done?

As mentioned before, local SEO takes time to show results, and it requires following best practices, not just spamming links.

To find out when should local SEO be applied to an article, or your overall website, you can start with an audit.

Auditing a website

Auditing your website is the perfect way to track your results, and see how well it has been performing.

There are no requirements as to when should you audit a website, but my recommendation would be once a week or even every 2 weeks, depending on how many pages the site has.

To launch an audit for your website, you can use a tool such as Uberssuggest, Ahrefs, or even Semrush.

They provide great reports on broken links, duplicate titles, missing descriptions, and much more, which could help you find the pain points of your site.

Reviewing and fixing mistakes

After reviewing the mistakes from the audit, you can safely re-launch it and see if all errors have been completely removed.

Once the audit tool stops indicating errors on your website, you can leave the website to get re-indexed by search engines, and track keep a track of the keyword rankings.

In case your website has many broken external links, you can reach out to other website owners, asking them to link to their article, and receive a backlink from them as well.

This way you will be powering your website with a strong link, and fixing a potential user experience issue.

Editing content

Once in a while content gets outdated or simply underperforms in the local SERPs. Depending on the time of publishing the content, changes may be required.

Since it may take around 2 to 4 months to see your content ranking steadily, deleting and re-creating it may negatively impact your rankings.

The best way to edit a website is by waiting some time, analyzing competitor keywords, and trying to input those keywords inside your content.

After editing has finished, you can fully reset the time of publishing, and ping Google to recrawl it.

Conclusion

Local SEO isn’t a fast process, nor is ranking. Depending on how old your website is, and how it was performing in the SERPs, changes can always be done.

The most efficient way to maintain a healthy website is publishing more frequently, and auditing every once in a while.