Expert Tips on Local SEO For Small Business
Local search is extremely important for small businesses. In fact, 80% of consumers utilize local search to find local businesses. This means if your business if your website isn’t optimized for local search, you could be missing out on 4 out of 5 of your potential customers.
Luckily, optimizing your business for local search is a straightforward process. Taking the necessary steps to ensure that your website is found for corresponding local searches will make sure that your business flourishes.
After all, 88% of all local searches result in the web user calling or visiting the business within 24 hours. If you want to learn more about how you want to build a strong foundation for your business, read this guide to achieve more online visibility from local searches.
Create a Google My Business Listing
It’s surprisingly shocking that only 44% of small businesses have claimed their Google My Business (GMB) listing. Considering that an average consumer will check local map listings to find a business near them, it would seem foolish to ignore setting up a listing.
That is how things currently are, but it doesn’t mean you have to neglect this very important process.
As you can see, the listing on the right of the image has all of the information that’s valuable to a potential customer. People can use these listings to visit a website, receive directions, look at online reviews, and make a phone call.
Creating a GMB listing is simple. Follow these steps to get the job done properly.
- Create a Google account or log in.
- Click here to visit Google My Business.
- Fill out the required fields, such as your phone number, address, etc.
- Verify the information.
- Claim your listing and submit.
This is the most basic step in optimizing your business for local search. Your GMB listing is the gateway where unrefined prospects become loyal customers.
Leverage Effective Internal Linking Strategies
Backlinks are the crux of every internet marketing strategy. Though, internal links are just as important to boost your SEO ranking. Generally speaking, internal links are essential for the following reasons:
- They support efficient website navigation
- Streamlines website hierarchy and information architecture
- Reinforces ranking power and page authority throughout your website
If you ever want to see a prime example of an effective internal linking strategy, visit a Wikipedia page. It’s not a coincidence that Wikipedia pages often rank highly in search engines.
They are highly-resourceful and have countless internal links to aid your comprehension and navigate to other useful pages. This increases the time you spent on Wikipedia, which lets search engines know that the site is valuable.
To the same effect, you should utilize sound internal link strategies to help your site rankly sufficiently for local searches.
Optimize all Metadata
Metadata is information that describes other data. This includes URLs, title tags, meta descriptions, and all the like.
You see metadata every time you conduct any type of search. Just take a look at this standard search.
Do you see the headers indicating what each web page is about?
This is metadata.
Do you also see the descriptions below the headers?
This is also metadata.
It’s important to optimize the metadata of your entire website architecture to show up for local searches. The best way to do this is by adding high-volume keywords in the URL, title, header, meta description, and body.
This will make sure that your website is found by consumers using the same high-volume keywords you’re including in your site’s metadata.
Add Location Pages to Your Website
If your business operates in multiple locations, you should reflect this on your website. The only way is to create separate location pages for each city or region you do business in.
For example, if you run a restaurant in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, you need to create different pages for both. Keep in mind that you can’t replicate the same city pages and change the city names.
This is frankly lazy and Google won’t rank them. Instead, put forth the time and effort to create custom location pages that provide information unique to the city the page is mentioning.
Develop Stellar Local Content
If you want to attract local leads, then you’ll need to develop a consistent local content strategy. Ranking your local content isn’t as difficult due to the low amount of competition compared to worldwide search results.
Therefore, all you need is a great content writer and marketing team on your side to craft stellar local content. For example, if you run a law firm, you can write a post about how readers can select the best firm in your city.
Finally, you can add tons of local keywords. This will help your content rank high for local searches and provide a lot of value to your audience — that’s effectively killing two birds with one stone.
Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly
More than half of all online searches happen on a mobile device. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, then you could be running potential customers off before they can even convert.
A website doesn’t appear the same way on a computer as it does on a tablet. Therefore, you will have to ensure that your website has a fast and convenient mobile version.
The important thing to realize here is that your desktop version should still provide the same features as your mobile version. It can be frustrating to be forced to use a computer just because the mobile version of a website stripped certain essential features.
Improve Your Local SEO Today!
Local SEO is vital for the online presence of any small business. Since people mainly conduct business online, building a strong foundation on the internet isn’t an optional task.
If you need help in jumpstarting the local SEO strategy of your business, give us a call at (214) 295–5845 to learn more about how we can help you today.
