If you own a local business such as a grocery store, coffee shop, real estate office, restaurant, dental clinic, or any other small business, then you need to do local SEO to attract the local audience to your business. As 97% of customers go through search engines to find a local business, it becomes essential for you to optimize your online presence for these customers. In this blog, we will tell you how you can improve your local SEO rankings instantly.
Optimizing your website for the local audience means more traffic, more conversions, and more sales. Without local SEO, you will miss out on these big opportunities. With local SEO strategy, you can prioritize appearing on search engine result pages in a specific location. If you are not on top rankings yet, it’s better you take note of these tactics.
Claim your Google My Business (GMB). It’s free! It establishes your online presence and tells people that you run a legitimate business. Verify your business listing and include your business name, operating hours, logo, images, and services your offer. If you do that, you will be rewarded with Google’s coveted sidebar space for local searches relevant to your niche.
According to a study by Moz, GMB is the #1 signal that influences ranking. So optimizing and verifying it is really important. There are various ways to do that:
Once you have verified your listing, it’s time to get genuine reviews from your existing customers. You can encourage your customers to share reviews online and respond to these reviews authentically.
Successful local SEO is becoming more about reputation management. Why? According to BrightLocal’s 2017 Local Consumer Review Survey, 85% of customers consider online reviews for a local business as a personal recommendation from someone who has used your product or services. This simply means positive reviews will bring in more customers while negative reviews will drive them away. What to do then?
You need to set up an active program to get your happy customers to write positive reviews for your business on Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, Trust Pilot, Merchant Circle or any other third party review sites. You can ask for a review in-person or via mail post-purchase. Do address the negative reviews and thank every reviewer.
Good reviews do not just mean more business, they drive your local SEO rankings up. According to a study, having reviews on your website or review sites can drive conversions by 18%. So if you have not made reputation management your 2019 goal yet, then contact our local SEO agency. We can help!
Google isn’t the only way to search for services or products. People also use local directories to learn more about the product or service they are going to purchase. Creating your business profile on local directories can help you get ranked for a specific search term. Even if you cannot get your website ranked at the top position for a competitive keyword, your local listing can help you get there. You will also get quality links back to your website, which can help your site rank well on Google. There are a number of local directories where we include the listing for our clients. These are reputable directories and have good rankings.
Apart from this, we encourage our clients to look for other directories like ZipLocal, Yellowise, Tupolo, MagicYellow, GetFave, Switchboard, LocalStack, and Metromix to promote their businesses. Be consistent with your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) in all these directories.
One thing that can grab the attention of your local audience is local content that meets their intent. Creating localized web content for specific locations that you serve is not enough, you need to do more than that. As the best local SEO agency, we work with our clients to create hyper-local content and it has proved to be the biggest differentiator for our client success in the past few years.
As a local business, you can talk about neighborhood events, local charities, workshops or other things happening in and around the city you are located at. This type of localized content can help you take advantage of the buzz going in your city and attract more visitors to your site. You can position your business as a local community leader by writing and publishing more local content. And, as you know, Google loves fresh and unique content. With more local content on your site, social media, and other channels, you can get your site ranked at the top positions of Google.
Here are some local content ideas you can take inspiration from for your local business:
Get more content ideas to boost your local SEO rankings in this blog.
Everybody is on social media and you need to be there too. Make social media profiles for your business on top platforms your customers are using such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, and LinkedIn. As we told you earlier, keep your NAP information consistent across all platforms.
Having social media profiles for your local business will help you get mentions, likes, reviews, and recommendations from people if they like your products or services. And, Google pulls results from social media channels for specific search terms. Therefore, social media not only help you to get increased visibility but also impacts your search rankings.
Check out some more tips to improve your local search rankings.
Conclusion
Local SEO is a powerful way of generating sales. It takes time but the efforts are worth it. If you follow these tactics, your website will show up for the right search terms, at the right time, driving your success instantly.
If you need help with optimizing your site for the local audience, then contact Source Soft, the best local SEO agency, to get started today! We will work with you to research the perfect keywords for your business, do competitor analysis, create local content, and practice engaging your customers. Looking forward to seeing your business at the top of Google SERPs!
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