Do you have a small business and are looking for ways on how you can grow it and reach out to your market locally? If yes, then I highly suggest you read on. Here’s a fun fact for you: four out of five customers use the Internet to look for local information that is helpful to them. With this, if your business is not optimized locally, then you are not as competitive and visible compared to all the other businesses around you.
Let us help you on how you can maximize your potential as a small-business owner. Here is your guide on what local search ranking is all about.
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Defining Local SEO
This is a method of promoting your business’ services or products targeting the local potential market. Search engines can gather local information from your local content, pages in your social media profiles, citations, and links to give the most significant local results to the customer.
What Is Google My Business And What Does It Do?
It is one of Google’s tools to aid your business, and the good thing about it is that it’s free! It is a marketing opportunity for you since it can attract millions of unique users each month. Here are some other benefits that you would want to know once you register for Google My Business:
- It can help your potential market to find your physical location. If you have a store, for example, then finding you shouldn’t be that hard compared to the days when the Internet was not an easy access yet. If they know your location, it means you are an existing business, and you could be the answer to what they are looking for over the web and directly go to your physical location.
- You can update the nature of your business and other important information such as hours of operation, directions, contact details, description, etc. If they have an idea of what your business is all about, it will be very helpful to all the users. It can also be easily be accessed on smart phones and other gadgets.
- You can use it to promote and announce special offers.
- You can create a profile here and make it as another method to communicate to new and existing clients.
- It has ‘Insights’ tab and shows you the analytics wherein you can also customize. The statistics shown here can greatly help you improve your engagement and sales. It tells you relevant data that you can use.
- Your clients can add reviews and ratings as well. Good or bad reviews can help you with your business. Reviews may be taken as constructive criticism for you to find ways on refining your products or services. However, the more positive reviews from happy customers, the better it will be for the image of your business. This can greatly boost your rankings in your local area. Make sure that you ‘walk the talk’ for your business. You do what you are actually advertising or offering.
These are just a few of the many benefits that Google My Business can do for you, and you don’t want to miss them. Don’t forget to register your business.
Update Your Website For Local SEO Improvement
Once you have set your Google My Business, here are crucial details about updating your website that you need to take note:
- The linking structure should be enhanced – Doing this can has positive benefits: It can support the navigation in your website, assist in the info architecture as well as the hierarchy of the website, and it allocates ranking power and page authority between pages.
- The URL, Headers, Title Tags, Content and Meta Description should be optimized – Whenever you add a fresh blog post for your website, it becomes a fresh indexed page, this is a new page where you can target a geographical phrase for search, which can also become and new break to be found in SERP or search engines results page. Always remember to utilize high-volume keywords in the title, URL, header, body and Meta description when you optimize the search engine content.
- Location Page is crucial; add it to your website – If you have more than one location, you can make locations pages since this can show detailed information for your web visitors the store hours, description, promotions, reviews, testimonies, NAP and a lot more. And remember not to duplicate content all over several location pages. And if your business is a single location, you can make a local About Us page description. Another great tip is to add to your website the Google Map on each location page(s) that you have.
- Local Content Creation – Make relevant content for your website that can help in attracting the local market. You can promote local news and related educational blog content and become the local authority in your industry.
- Mobile-friendly website is a must – Remember, not all people have access to laptops, and you have a huge local market out there that performs local search using their smart phones and other similar gadgets.
Engage In Internet Directories
These are the following particulars that you also need to focus on to acquire a top local search ranking:
- NAP or Name, Address and Phone – you need to be consistent here to make sure that the users as well as search engines can easily look for you. It should be incorporated in your site as an HTML text that can be crawled. Do not embed details into images; it is best if you place it in the header or footer portion.
- Citations and Online Directories should be boosted – list your business in various business directories such as SG Street Directory, Yelu, The Green Book and many others. Avoid misspelled words, wrong info and other discrepancies. Don’t to duplicate listings and everything must be consistent.
- Relevance and Authority from inbound links – this method can greatly boost your local SEO ranking since each inbound link can help you be identified by Google as a legit business or company, and it can increase your domain authority at the same time. You can get inbound links from Guest Blog Posting, Partnerships and Sponsorship.
- Social Media Engagement and Posting Google My Business – Share your Google My Business all over your social media account pages since Google highly consider this as important.
If you want your local search ranking to improve for your business, this guide will definitely help. You can discuss this with an SEO expert to help you understand the terms and the whole process, especially if you don’t have any idea what search engine optimization and its technical side. Well, some other tips here may not be that easy and should be done on a long-term basis achieve success. All hard work pays off in the end; we hope to see you on the top ranks or on Google’s first result page.
