According to a survey published by BrightLocal research, 98 percent of people use the internet to find a local business. For local businesses with limited resources such as time and money, it can be difficult to ascertain where their marketing efforts should be focused. Fortunately, there is one key element that cannot be ignored; the ability for people to find a business online. SEO is an effective way of ensuring this visibility in the long term and offers great ROI potential.
When budgeting constraints are present, small businesses must know what elements they should concentrate on first when taking up SEO tasks themselves (or enlisting help from outside).
1. The Google Local Pack
Creating, verifying, and optimizing a Google Business Profile is an essential step in boosting local businesses’ visibility on the Local Pack. To maximize success when setting up a profile, there are three of the most impactful optimization techniques:
- Carefully choose the best primary category for your business before adding two to three additional relevant categories. The primary category plays a key role in determining rank within the Local Pack so experiment with different options.
- Make sure all available fields are filled out as completely as possible; craft an attention-grabbing description that incorporates rich keywords while still sounding natural.
- Ensure accuracy by matching every source online (including websites) exactly with your business’s name, address, phone number plus website (NAP+W). For better search engine recognition, it’s preferable to use a local rather than a toll-free phone number.
2. Encourage Customers to Leave Reviews
Encouraging customers to leave reviews can boost a local business’s rank on Google, including the quantity of both numerical star ratings and text-based reviews. It is important for businesses to take these seriously as it is crucial for providing an accurate portrayal of their services.
Here are some tips to encourage positive reviews:
- Share direct links with customers so they can easily leave reviews. This helps maintain fresh content in the review section. Here’s how to share a link for customers to leave a review on your Google Business Profile.
- Do not offer incentives or rewards for leaving positive feedback, as Google does not condone such practices.
- Show appreciation by reading and replying back to user comments using Google My Business.
- Leverage third party sources like TripAdvisor or Yelp! to include additional perspectives from other users. This adds value to your listing page and further assists potential customers in making informed decisions.
3. Publish Quality Content Regularly
Quality content is essential for successful on-page ranking. There are several ways to ensure that your website has quality content and stands out from the competition:
- Study Google’s search quality rater guidelines, paying specific attention to their definitions of “experience” and “expertise” so you know how they evaluate quality.
- Make sure each service page contains enough helpful and usable material about its topic by researching what your top competitors have included in theirs.
- Showcase how your business contributes positively within the community by creating informative articles or acting as a guide. This can attract good links back to the site while also showcasing expertise in certain topics or areas.
- Provide multiple types of media, like pictures, videos, and infographics, so visitors will be able to find more than just written material related to your services and products.
Quality content is the most reliable way to separate yourself from the competition.
4. Use Internal Links
Organizing content into hierarchical categories can be a powerful technique for optimizing websites and improving user experience. This is called SEO siloing. Through this method, webpages that are related to each other are grouped together in order to create an efficient internal linking system. This helps search engines understand the purpose of a website more quickly and enables users to easily find what they need. Improving the user experience can improve your search results rankings.
5. Optimize the Website
For local businesses just getting started, optimizing their websites for SEO is essential. An effective way to do this is to include geographic terms and other keywords in the meta tags and on webpage content.
To further ensure that a site performs well during searches conducted on mobile devices, it should be configured with mobile optimization features in mind. Additionally, securing a website by enabling HTTPS connectivity ensures an additional layer of protection from any potential threats.
6. Include Quality Links
Local businesses should strive to have quality, local links in order to establish trustworthiness in their community. To get the most out of link building efforts:
- Develop content that is relevant and helpful for the target audience.
- Be sure to acquire links from distinct IPs, domains, and WHOIS databases.
- Join a local organization or list the business in an appropriate directory is beneficial.
Rely on trusted experts who can help you. At Search Control, we know what it takes to improve your local SEO performance. Contact us today at +1 480-378-0246.
