TLDR

Local SEO caters to the business features of narrowing to geographic boundary and targeting a specific region

Why Local SEO:

Any SEO plan aimed at clients in a particular area, city, or neighborhood must include local search. In order to increase your rankings and visibility in local search results, such as Google's Map Pack/Local Pack, you should concentrate on local SEO. Increasing webpage rankings in organic search is done through organic SEO. Your website's position in those organic results can have a beneficial impact on how well it performs in the Local Pack. When Google deems that a search has local intent, the organic listings are another fantastic opportunity for your local business to show up in front of eager searchers. Therefore, despite the fact that local and organic SEO are connected in these ways, each calls for a distinct strategy that uses various optimization techniques.

What is Local SEO:

Search engine optimization for local search results is known as local SEO. This entails assisting Google in making your company's listing in the Local Pack/Map Pack rank higher and show up more frequently in response to a higher volume of pertinent queries. The goal of Google is to provide users with the most relevant results for every search. And those Map Pack results will be prominently shown on the first page of the search results when its algorithms determine that your purpose is local — that you are seeking for something in the vicinity of you. Additionally, organic search results for establishments and services in your neighbourhood may supplement them.

Local SEO is important for news websites and journalists because many a times we target stories that are unique to the geography. It might cater uniquely to a specif set of people in a neighborhood not a wider audience. hence Local SEO is of greater importance if you are a publication house that serves a specific region or language.

How to Improve Local SEO Results:

  1. Determine what terms you want your business to rank for. This will be based primarily on the services and/or products you offer. In case of local news, it can be classifieds, ads, searches and other native parameters that we want to narrow down into. Later, you will use local SEO tools to search for these terms, identify geo-specific keywords, assess search volume, and ultimately decide which keywords to target on your website.
  2. Before jumping into optimizing your site, you need to determine what (if anything) is broken and whether your site has a solid foundation. Local SEO fails if the foundational system for our news site is not formalized. Hocalwire CMS takes care of these initial settings to boost primary configuration.
  3. One of the goals of local SEO is to not only rank in local search but to outrank your local competitors. In order to do this, you need to know what keywords they are ranking for and how. You can subscribe to the local feeds of news in the region or language and reverse engineer to target keywords and outperform competition using Hocalwire CMS
  4. You can use SEO tools to research these terms to examine search volume and competition level. You can also look for geo-specific keywords by adding your location to the keywords you are searching for. Hocalwire lets you add a location in its text editor to denote the story of origin and embeds the location on to the HTML code that enables web crawlers to identify
  5. Google Business Profile is a free platform all local businesses can use to drive more traffic, generate customer reviews, and more. It's essential for your business to have a fully optimized listing to increase your chances of ranking in search.
  6. Localized landing pages are webpages created specifically for ranking in organic local search. These pages should be optimized with the geo-specific keywords you've identified and include informative content that draws in your target audience. We enable you to have routing features and dynamic landing sites based on location within Hocalwire CMS
  7. Link building is an important part of SEO in general, but localized link building can look a bit different from link building for other sites. Here, the physical location of the sites linking to your site is also important. Hocalwire maintains a sitemap and linktree that gets auto updated and grows as you build content.
  8. The number of positive reviews your website has on GBP is a significant ranking factor for local SEO. Therefore, one of your top goals as a local business owner is to generate as many positive reviews as possible – ideally, across all your directory platforms. Creating Pseudo Office Address to districts and states can help in search query and validation of the business presence even if you are a digital publishing house.


Hocalwire CMS looks after all technical aspects that help news websites publish stories faster by making them focus on content. Local SEO is a niche optimization strategy that most CMS miss out and Hocalwire CMS solves it as part of its Localization Initiatives. Give Hocalwire CMS a free trial now and test our features.