A Small Business Guide to Local SEO
To start up a retail business the first crucial thing to look for is a high street location that offers great visibility and traffic. Thus, making your business easy to find. Being easy to find on the physical map will offer more clients and customers. Similarly, being easy to find on the internet and using local SEO as a business tool will increase your business even further. Here, we will discuss the reasons as to why you should list your business on local SEO.
What is Local SEO? What are the benefits?
Not everyone fully understands what local SEO is. Simply put, it is about offering your business details on local search based on your location.
Relevance, distance, and prominence are the key factors that help boost the local SEO results. Following a few reasons to list your business on local SEO:
· Local SEO will help in making your business visible to the locals.
· It offers a high return on your investment and this return is the best as compared to other marketing options.
· Customers will trust your business more when they will be able to look it up on their smartphones.
· It helps in building a better connection with your local partners and clients.
How to start with local SEO and improve your business?
The following part will explain how to get started with local SEO and bring a significant improvement in your business.
1. Google My Business
To get listed in the local search results you need to create “Google My Business” with up to date information about your business.
Following are some of the things to enter here:
- Complete business information
- Verify business location
- Enter accurate working hours
- Add photos of your business
- Manage viewers and respond accordingly
2. Use “Google Maps Embed API”
to place a street view of your business or to include the map on your website.
3. Make a proper on-page SEO
Two factors that will help you do so are:
· Products and service you offer
· Location of availability
Some of the key on-page elements of SEO to focus on:
- Title tags
- Meta tags
- Header tags
- Page content
- Images
- Name, address and contact information
4. Use reviews to make your business stand out.
Some of the proven ways are:
- Create review links on your websites
- Include review links in emails
- Use the review site information on your business card
- Ask your clients to leave feedback in the form of reviews
And most importantly never leave negative reviews unaddressed.
5. Add local backlinks
Backlinks on a website help improve the local ranking drastically. If you produce locally focused content then you can gain a lot of local audiences. Some of the proven ways to create local content:
- Pitch local media information in stories
- Build a partnership with local influencers
- Capitalize some local events
Social media and SEO are individually two great marketing platforms but if you merge both then the results are bound to be awesome. Use social media to grow fans who will help in spreading the news of your business and services. Social media also helps in building trust and with the right keywords and backlinks you can reach out to your target audience.
Bottom line
Local SEO is very important for small business owners and helps in targeting the right audience and in building relevance in the searches. The above will help you achieve the search criteria of relevance, prominence, and distance. This will help you build a large audience and increase your client base.
