A common predicament that small business owners have while competing with other businesses and huge brands is their limited budget. This is one major reason why local SEO is considered as a powerful marketing tool by many small businesses.
In this article, there are some effective local SEO methods that can help small businesses in achieving good rankings in local searches. Keep on reading to find out more about it.
Optimize Your Google My Business Page
To ensure that your listing appears in local search results on Google Search as well as Google Maps, you need to create a listing on Google My Business and update the information on it regularly. A business also needs to do the following: fill out complete information, keep accurate record of working hours, verify the business’ location(s), include relevant photographs, and respond to and manage reviews.
Optimize Your Local Business Listings
One of the most common places where people tend to search for local businesses is local directories. Hence, you need to add your business listing to all the popular directories within your niche. Such directories often rank higher in Google search results when it comes to local search queries, so a user who goes through these directories can be easily redirected to your site or blog if the listings are optimized. This not only helps in increasing the organic search traffic but also helps in getting qualified leads.
Update the Name, Address, and Phone Section
The name, address, and phone number of your business are the most important elements of your Google My Business listing as they provide contact details to potential customers. Knowing this, you should ensure that there are no misspellings or unclear abbreviations or words in the listing. Additionally, if any of the information or contact details change, then the listing should be updated accordingly for consistency. This will help reduce customer confusion.
Optimize Your Website Content for Local Keywords
In order for your website to rank higher in local searches, your website content needs to be optimized with keywords that are relevant to your customers. This can be done using Google’s Keyword Planner where you can find relevant and local keywords using its location filter.
After you have made a list of relevant local keywords, include them in the website’s content, titles, meta descriptions as well as URLs. However, one also needs to examine the competitiveness of the keywords before using them. Tools such as SpyFu can be used for this purpose as they check whether the same keywords are being used by your competitors or not. If the keywords are strengthening a competitors’ local SEO, they should also work for you.
Generate Online Reviews
Having positive reviews can influence your customers to make a purchase and can also help you attract new customers by making your business appear more trustworthy. For this reason, you should encourage your customers to share their positive experiences by writing reviews.
If you ever receive a negative review, however, you should immediately acknowledge it and apologize to the user for whatever dissatisfaction your business may have caused them. You should also try to solve their problem professionally and politely.
Create a Mobile-Responsive Website
The use of smartphones and tablets has increased drastically in the last two decades, and so has the number of mobile searches. To accommodate this growth and to address customer search queries from mobile devices, businesses need to design and develop mobile-responsive sites that can enhance user experience on smart devices.
Creating a mobile-responsive website design can help you get an edge over your competitors and help you improve your local SEO ranking. Some starting points to creating a mobile friendly website are as follows: optimize the images and videos for reduced page loading time, plan the website layout for ease of use, and improve the loading speed of the website to hold the attention of the user. You can also include social media sharing buttons on your product pages and blog posts to ensure that visitors can easily share your content within their network.
Strengthen Your Social Media Presence
Social media and SEO are both great marketing tools for small businesses. Individually, they are both effective, but when used together, they can be even more powerful. Because of the extensive number of social media users, your business is bound to attract customers from the numerous different platforms. By grabbing the attention of potential customers through your social media, you will be able to spread awareness of your business’ presence as well as promote your products or services.
Key Takeaways
According to a Digital Marketing Agency in Australia, while local SEO is highly economical, it also helps small businesses to generate a greater number of leads. Small business, then, need to be utilizing this rapidly growing marketing trend and stay aware of what current SEO trends are. This will help your small business keep up with consumers as well as beat the competition for better local search engine rankings.
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