Did you know that “Local” is by far the most popular keyword searched on Google, Yelp, and other local search engines? Small businesses can get ahead of their competition with these Local SEO Tips for Small Businesses!
While local SEO tactics are essential for any business, they can seem intimidating for smaller operations to tackle. However, the approach to building your local awareness should be similar to getting big-name sites to notice you.
With a well-thought-out plan of action, employing the right local SEO strategies can facilitate growth in local markets.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO refers to a specific type of search engine optimization, which is geared towards increasing your visibility in the local area.
The purpose of local SEO is to have your website appear on the map rankings for searches made within a given radius of your business location.
With the emergence of local search marketing, you will need to add a local SEO approach to your current search engine optimization campaign.
Ultimately, both pay off and there is a significant increase in traffic over time if done right.
Local SEO is not only the most important form of SEO, it is also one of the most complicated. Despite the fact that having a website optimized for local search engine results pages (SERPs) will likely result in more traffic than most other forms of online marketing, many businesses overlook their local web presence.
You can always refer to any credible local SEO service provider to get it done the right way. Also, local SEO is affordable and does not require as much time as regular SEO.
Importance Of Local SEO For Small Businesses
Local SEO for small businesses is very important for increasing the ranking of their website in search results. If your business is online and also if you do not want to lose customers, it is important for you to reach out to the customers, who live in the same region or city where your business is located.
This process can be done by local SEO and there are many benefits of using this.
A lot of local business owners deal with skepticism about Local SEO. Its importance is still very high, but many do feel it to be on the decline.
Local SEO dwells on earning visibility and traffic from highly relevant businesses that are physically located in the same city or county as the business itself.
Some of the top benefits of local SEO for small businesses are:
- Increase website traffic
- More leads
- More sales
- Increased in loyal customer base
- Your chances for local exposure increases
- More footsteps to the physical store
- Google’s credibility
Local SEO Actionable Tips For Small Businesses
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You can add Schema Markup to your Website
Google recently announced it will be using Schema Markup to improve local search results. That’s great news because Schema can help you show up in a lot more places in the map pack in the Google Maps results.
Google has developed a new way for searchers to understand specific types of businesses and their locations. Using this new markup, known as Schema, will help local search engines better understand your business data.
In Google’s eyes, Schema will give you a “more comprehensive view” of your business. The more Google understands your business, the more likely it is to rank you for what you do well.
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Add Location Pages
A big part of local SEO is to get your city and state on the map, and yes you can do that with Google My Business (reviews & landing page), but it’s not the only thing. Another thing you can do is add location pages to your website, this is a common thing for e-commerce stores, but in this post, I’ll show you how to do it for non-e-commerce websites.
A little secret that many local businesses don’t know is that Google loves local search results. It puts a lot of emphasis on them over national results which means you have a better chance of being seen.
The best way to rank for local search results is obviously to have a proper local business website with your NAP information posted for the world to see.
There are other ways to rank locally as well. One of those ways is to create location pages.
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Add Local Keywords
For a small business owner, an online presence is one of the best ways to bring new customers as well as keep an existing customer base.
Especially with the emergence of Social Media Marketing, staying on top of your local SEO has never been more important. New business owners have a lot of new problems to deal with on a day-to-day basis and making sure that they have a good Internet presence is often an afterthought.
However, since customers are becoming more and more comfortable with researching on the Internet before making a purchase decision, local SEO has become a hot topic for small businesses.
Let’s assume you have a business website in Phoenix, Arizona and you want to attract customers in the local area.
Location in a web page title is a powerful factor for your site when trying to improve local search engine rankings.
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Update Business Accounts on Google and Bing
Every week we work with people that don’t realize they need to link their google and Bing local accounts. They rank pretty well on google locally without any Bing local presence.
So we decide to optimize for both Bing and Google as this means you can use the same content across searches on both engines.
This works super well as google is used more than any other search engine, however until you’ve claimed your listing, there’s no information about your business on being local.
It’s a key element of how Search Engine Optimization works online to have at least 2 listings on every platform.
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Be aware of the user’s behavior
Customer behavior can be critical in improving your website’s visibility in SERPs. Webmasters aim to enhance the user experience by using search engine user-friendly strategies.
However, often people don’t put this into practice because they usually only care about satisfying search engines. Here are the tips for you to follow when optimizing for users rather than just Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.
Search is quickly becoming a core component in a modern digital marketing strategy. When your SEO is right, it becomes a reliable source of high-quality traffic.
Visibility among search queries always changing there’s nothing more important for a marketer to stay on top of that.
To order to boost your website’s performance. You need to be aware of the trends in your underlying keyword data and the trends in your user behavior. This may impact how search engines render search results.
