As a small business owner, Google must know your location and the services and products you offer in order to be seen by a relevant audience.
To become visible to a regional audience, it is important to follow local SEO best practices. By following these practices your small business can improve organic traffic from searches performed by local customers.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO is the method used to optimize your website for your local area. Optimizing your website is done to make sure people can find your small business. Local SEO is necessary for smaller businesses as opposed to companies that conduct business on a national level.
National SEO focuses on ranking across the country, while local SEO concentrates on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) in your specific region of the country.However, ranking high for local searches calls for more than optimizing only your website. Incorporate these local SEO strategies for small businesses into your current marketing campaign to get started!
Create Local-Based Content
Creating compelling content that relates to your local audience will grab your loyal and prospective customers’ attention.
Authoring blogs is a terrific way to help with local SEO. Write about activities and events happening in your community. When blogging, try and interlink other content from your site into the article.
If you service multiple parts of a region, set up location-specific web pages on your site with high-quality content. For example, if you are a cleaning business with multiple locations you can create different pages for all of your locations.
Use Local Keywords
When creating content, your keywords should be purposeful to your local audience.
Google’s free Keyword Planner helps you research keywords to use in your content. It enables you to discover local keywords that relate to your business and shows you the estimated monthly searches they will most likely receive.
Optimize Your Google My Business
Google My Business is the elite choice of local searches.
To guarantee your small business is optimized for Google My Business take the following steps.
- Create and verify your Google My Business page.
- Motivate your happy customers to write favorable reviews for your business.
- Respond personally to all reviews both positive and negative.
- Post-up-to-date holiday hours.
- Include high-quality images and videos.
- Include a FAQ.
- Add social media posts to your Google My Business
Once Google verifies your small business as legitimate, they may decide to reward you with a highly desirable right-hand sidebar in Google’s local search.
After you have a bonafide Google My Business page, share your page on social media, furthering your local reach. [Learn how to create your Google My Business page here]
Conclusion
Using local SEO strategies for small businesses is one of the most effective tools to use when it comes to marketing a specific region in the country. And, although you may feel intimidated, it’s much easier than it seems.