Regardless if you’re running an online or brick and mortar establishment, having a strong local online presence is vital to your success. You see, there’s a statistic that about 78 percent of local mobile searches later become offline purchases. In other words, regardless of what kind of method you use for your sales, in order to stay on the radar in 2019, you need to have a formidable online presence. With that in mind, here are several tips your small business can master the art of local SEO and turn it into a powerful competitive edge.
On-site optimization
The first issue that we need to discuss here is the topic of on-site optimization. More specifically, we need to talk about the title and meta description tags. While Google algorithm has advanced so much over the past years and decades, the truth is that it still depends on bots to index all the pages. By optimizing your title and meta descriptions, you’re allowing these bots to better understand what your website is all about.
Keywords with location
What better way is there to market your business as local than to use keywords with a location in your SEO efforts. While this may seem like something too simple, you need to keep in mind that when it comes to the local SEO, this is one of the most efficient ways for you to make long-tail keywords. If this is how people are going to look for your service, you have to accommodate them in any manner possible.
Registering on business directories
This is the first thing that people look up when trying to find a business are the businesses listed in Google My Business card. This is why it’s such a high priority that your business gets listed here. Just keep in mind that this is not the only business directory out there and that you might want to get listed on as many of them as possible. Yelp is just one of the examples of the platform that some of your local users might go to in order to look you up.
Make your design user-friendly
One of the biggest mistakes that a lot of businesses make when it comes to their SEO is focusing on it only if they use it as a sales platform. This, however, is a major mistake, seeing as how your entire business is sometimes evaluated based on the performance of your website. This is why you might want to consider finding a capable WordPress development agency to outsource this task.
Put the focus on online reviews
When making a decision on whether to make a purchase or do business with you, people don’t care about what your marketers or web designers have to say about your business. What they care about is the opinion of their own peers. This is even more important due to the fact that these peers are people from their own neighborhood, which just makes their opinion more valid and their word more trustworthy. In other words, you need to double down your efforts of getting online reviews.
Write a great ‘About us’ page
Making a proper introduction to your audience is not just a polite thing to do but it’s something that might reduce your bounce rate by quite a bit. There are several tips that you should adhere to while doing so. First of all, you’re trying to inspire trust so try to use facts as much as possible and avoid making it seem like you’re hyping up your product. Second, you need to be specific and tell your visitors what they want to know. This means stating facts like what your business does, what your business does better than others, as well as what are your goals and values.
Act locally
While brand mentions may not be an SEO metric in a traditional sense, they definitely boost your SEO efforts in more than one way. This is why you need to collaborate with local influencers buy also find other ways to act locally. For instance, attending local events and distributing printed marketing materials is an offline business promotion method, yet, it benefits your SEO efforts in several ways. First of all, it increases the number of your website visitors and second, it increases the number of your brand mentions online.
Research your competition
Reviewing your competitors’ online presence can help you come up with some ideas of your own. One of the simplest SEO tricks you can do is use the tool like Ahrefs in order to check out their domain, their traffic, and several other metrics. It goes without saying that you should do this for your own brand before that. Once you have both of these tables, you can compare them in order to see in which areas you’re ahead and where you’re lagging behind.
In conclusion
Local SEO isn’t relevant just for small businesses, seeing as how some major corporations may feel the need to market their franchises individually for the maximum effect. For a small business, however, this creates a fighting chance, seeing as how you don’t have to triumph against your much bigger competitors on a global scale (where you would stand no chance) but face them in your own region/area. In other words, by mastering the art of local SEO, you may help your small business unleash its full potential.
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