Mastering SEO in Nigeria: How to Optimize for Local Search Visibility in 7 Steps

As a brand, targeting a local audience, one of the secret game changing plans you can use right now is to understand the local SEO in Nigeria, engage in geo-targeting to gain razor-sharp visibility and then evolve pragmatic regional and industry focused strategies to drive your outcomes.

This is what your favorites brands are doing to gain the needed boost in visibility, improve traffic and drive their business into the heart of the largest market in Africa.

While most businesses are reaping off the benefits of local search engine optimization (AKA geo-targeting), unfortunately, a lot of brands and are not aware of geo targeting for local businesses.

So many do not even realize the need to optimize for local SEO in Nigeria not to talk about taking steps to do so. This is the advantage you have over these businesses. Because you’re reading this right now.

And after reading this tutorial, you’re going to learn about the local SEO strategies you can use to drive your business and make profit from customers in your locality.

But, What Exactly is Local Search Optimization?

I’m sure this might be the question on your mind right now and yes, I’ll be defining it below.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is a search engine optimization strategy focused on optimizing a website in order to gain improved traffic, attract leads and brand awareness from local search.

For starters, local SEO is targeted at getting your website to attract more traffic and customers from your local area, your geographic location or preferred target location.

Although it is popularly used by walk-in-stores, shops and businesses, local search engine optimization is not just about brick and mortar stores and local businesses.

It is an SEO strategy that can be used by any business in need of improved local traffic and search visibility. It is also very useful for businesses who prefer to target or sale to customers in a specific region.

If this sounds like you, then in the following paragraphs, I’ll be sharing with you the top bullet proof strategies you can use to boost your local search SEO in Nigeria, drive region specific traffic and customers for your business.

Identify your Goal & Preferred Target Audience

Before you get all set to create your local SEO strategy, one of the key things you want to do is to identify your goal and then go ahead and define the target audience that will get you to actualize these goals.

So, at this point, you want to start with identifying your goal. What exactly do you want to achieve with the local search engine optimization strategy you plan to set up?

If your answer to this question is to get X number of new customers from Lagos for example, you want to go ahead and find out the specific kind of audience that can actually get you to attract that.

Finding out your specific goal and your audience gets you some insights on the kind of content to create, the key words to optimize for and exactly how to appeal to this audience.

Keep in mind, eventhough you’re engaging in local search engine optimization to target people from a specific region, you can’t target everyone from that region.

That’s why regardless, you have to identify your goals clearly then use this to create an audience that will get you to meet these goals.

Use Strategic Keywords Targeting

One of the most crucial steps to boost your local SEO in Nigeria or any other country for that matter, is to analyze and target your use of keywords accordingly.

First off, start with a complete keyword analysis to find out the top ranking keywords for your target niche and audience.

While at it, identify the top ranking websites for that keyword, their domain authority, back links and essentially keyword difficulty levels associated with those keywords.

As soon as this is done, get over to your content strategy to find out content ideas that aligns with your goals based on those keywords ideas and then find ways you can use these keywords strategically in your content.

After that, go ahead and create the content then optimize your keywords accordingly where you want them rank both within your content and web pages.

For most of our clients, we usually consider niched keyword difficulty, before deciding to use either long tail or short tail keywords to drive our outcomes.

To generate faster and more consistent outcomes, you want to pay attention to this while creating your own local search optimization strategy.

Create Targeted Content

It’s nearly impossible to create an effective local SEO strategy without creating and sharing pieces of content targeted at meeting the needs of people in the geographic region you’re targeting.

So before you work on creating your strategy, pick up the audience you were able to find in your step one above, find out, what are the kind of content that’s appealing to this audience?

Also, find out specifically based on the keywords you found in step two, what are their pain points and specific solutions they are looking for?

Using the details you find from your search, create tailor made content targeted at this people.

Beyond creating content, you want to be able to meet the needs of this audience directly with your content by going the extra mile to add exceptional value to each piece of content you create.

For our SEO and content marketing students, one of our key advice is always to make sure that outside adding extra value, you create you create a very appealing content that will draw in your target audience with ease.

Enlist in Google My Business

Enlisting your business in the local Google My Business Listing is an important strategy you can use to improve your local SEO in Nigeria.

GMB is a business listing brochure from Google that allows you to create a free business account to list your business.

It is a very important ranking factor considered by Google when it comes to local search engine optimization.

And the good thing about enlisting on Google My Business is that it helps your business to show up in Google Local Search engine and maps.

And it’s very easy to get started.

You can start with creating an account on GMB, listing all your services and or products and optimizing them accordingly.

In addition to that, you can also add photos and videos that depicts the services or products among other details and even update the page with posts at intervals.

Doing this enhances your visibility in local search.

Use Targeted Backlinks

Another important strategy to boost your local SEO in Nigeria is to use targeted local back links.

Targeted back linking involves building back links only on strategic websites, instead of building them indiscriminately.

By this I mean that instead of optimizing to get back link from any websites, you can choose to get your back links only from specific local websites.

And these websites will have to be high ranking websites from the region you want to build your local search engine optimization.

So, if you’re targeting to improve your local SEO in Nigeria for example, then your goal will be to build your back links only on top ranking Nigerian websites.

Doing this enhances your chances of improved ranking within the target region.

Get Customer Reviews

Reviews are incredible social proof strategies that can go a long way in boosting your brand perception and leadership both locally and internationally.

Getting over to search engine optimization, It gets even better. And you can use customer reviews as a tool to amplify your local SEO in Nigeria.

Starting with your local listings, get your clients to drop authentic reviews and ratings for you after delivering a service or selling a product to them.

Do the same for top customer review directories, including Facebook and other platforms.

According to a research by Moz, the more positive reviews you have on these platforms, the better visibility for your local search.

As much as possible, do not stop at just a few, press on for more reviews as you get to do more jobs or sell more products.

Outside helping in your local search visibility, reviews offers prospective customers an insight into your business and reasons to patronize you.

Optimize for Mobile Search

Overall, majority of both local and non-local searches are from smart phones. For this reason, mobile search cannot be ignored if you’re plan to boost your local SEO in Nigeria.

So, starting with your website, be sure your website architecture, user interface and software combinations is well optimized for mobile search visibility.

After that, head over to your Google my business page and then turn on the click to call buttons.

For most of our clients, on average; more than 50 percent of clients coming from Google search have contacted their businesses directly via calls initiated from search results page.

With all your details indicated on the search results, including your phone number and website address, there are chances that a good number of mobile users will contact you directly from search.

Final Words

Desiring to drive improved local SEO traffic to your business is not enough. To actually achieve this goal, you have to take steps to get the results you want, using the strategies above.

Again, you also want to ensure that your Name, Address and Phone number (NAP) are consistent across all platforms.

These are some important factors that will affect your local search engine visibility.

Furthermore, you want to make the most of social media and content marketing to further drive your local traffic by creating geographically targeted contents and a well optimized social media profile.

So, there you have the strategic steps to drive local SEO in Nigeria for your business. But you don’t have to do it alone. Allow our team of SEO experts to do the ground work that will get you the improved visibility you desire by reaching out here.

Now, it’s over to you. What irks you about local SEO? Drop your comments below.