A lawn mowing business, for instance, needs the patronage of houses and businesses within its vicinity. Such a business might not need to compete at the national level except it wants to scale. This is where local SEO comes in for business that centers on a regional operation. National SEO, on the other hand, involves competing with businesses nationwide in which such a company tries to rank across the country. In other words, with local SEO, you want to market your business to customers within your vicinity.
You get many benefits from optimizing your business for local SEO. The business gets more leads, traffic, conversion since you are targeting local customers. It is an excellent strategy to compete against a big brand that has the power of unlimited resources for its SEO services. Local SEO helps you stand against them and generate more traffic.
This article explores different ways you can optimize your business for local SEO.
1. Include Your Business in Local Directories
One of the best ways to optimize your business for local SEO is via citation building and local directory listing. While the process could be time-consuming, there are tools to make this easier, provided you can pay for them.
For this to be effective, your entire entries should be similar. You can achieve this by duplicating the exact format you have from your company’s Google My Business page and listing your business how it appears in the local directories. As a local dealership, for instance, you can consider automotive SEO services to help with this.
2. Your Website Should Reflect Location
When search engines crawl your site, they seek beneficial results to provide for searches in SERP. With this, having a specific landing page for all your business locations will make it easy for search engines to detect your listing and give the best result quickly.
It is essential to include suite numbers and either abbreviate or fully write other important info like avenue, road, and street. The way you present such information on this page will influence how you will show it everywhere. As a result, bear this in mind when deciding the writing format for your location.
3. Keep Your “Google My Business Page” Fully Updated
Internet users daily rely on the business listing for the correct information. You need to make this easy and quick for any internet user to identify as it is essential for your SEO. Moreover, you could simply log into your Google My Business Page and ensure all information necessary to your business is correct. These are information like your business name, address, phone number, etc. Brief and straightforward information that describes your business is also essential. Let the page have a link to your website alongside your opening and closing time.
As much as possible, you should make such a listing appealing with your business logo as the profile pictures. Adding business photos, photos of your products, and whatever you believe is primal to business success. Pictures they say are worth a thousand words, so ensure the images are high quality and professional.
For businesses that operate in more than one location, there are ways to keep your page organized and easy for users to find.
4. Use Online Reviews to Build Your Reputation
We are in the information age, which makes it easy for people to know about you, your brand, and your service’s quality from the comfort of their homes. Without interacting with you, customers can get enough information for them to decide to either patronize you or your competitor. Online reviews are one effective way people get such information.
Businesses offering a product for sale or service can allow customers to write reviews on their website about their product/service. This transparency can go a long way to build trust, as it shows that the business is not scared of feedback. For some industries such as restaurants, bars, hotels, etc., such a review can determine your profit as many consumers consider it before making their decision.
As a business, make sure to encourage customers to leave you a review. Also, engage with your customer by making it a habit to respond to all reviews. A link to external review sites on your website can also help your local SEO.
5. Optimize for Voice Search
There are indications that voice search will see a boost in the coming years. This makes it essential to optimize your business to suit how people make requests and ask questions by speaking into their device, in contrast to ordinarily typing into such a device.
Customers typically use long-tail keywords when having a voice search, in contrast with regular search. As a result, it makes sense to adjust the SEO appeal of your content to suit a more conversational style of an answer to a request. For example, you should take care of traditional questions starters like (what, who, where, when, how, and why.)
One also needs to take care of user intent during voice optimization because many people search only when they need specific information. As a result, a user who asks what their business hours are should immediately access such information.
Conclusion
While there are many strategies to improve SEO, many such tips hardly consider local SEO. This is a grave mistake as many people are searching for businesses and local service providers. With these tips for optimizing your local SEO, a company will have no problem ranking and attracting the right customers.