With search engines constantly changing and updating, and the number of websites battling for local visibility on the rise, it can often require an impressive amount of work to successfully get your website noticed locally. With the digital age meaning that consumers are increasingly researching local businesses online before purchasing, even if the said business does not sell products online, it’s become more important than ever before for small, local businesses to have a good online presence and appear in Google’s ‘Local Search’ results. We’ve put together some top tips to help your business improve its local SEO strategy.
Improve SEO by Outsourcing
Often, the reason that your local SEO is failing can have a lot to do with the general standard of SEO practice for your business. For many small business owners, SEO is something that they do not know much about and have to learn in order to make sure that their business has a successful online presence. If you are a small business owner who is feeling less than confident about tackling local SEO for your company website, outsourcing the work to a professional SEO company can be the best decision and much more cost effective, as you’ll start to see results more quickly.
Local Link Building
Good quality link building is absolutely essential for improving your business website’s online presence and achieving a higher ranking in the Google search engine results. However, working on improving your local links can help you to gain more of an online presence in your local area alone, where you will find the majority of your target market. In order to do this, you could get involved in something newsworthy in order to appear on a local news site, guest post on locally run blogs, or collaborate with other businesses in the local area.
Claim Company Profiles
One of the most important parts of improving your local search rankings is claiming online company profiles. One of the most important of these is your Google My Business page, which you may have also known as Google Places. You should not only make it a priority to ensure that your Google My Business page is claimed and updated with your business’ info, but you should continually update it in order to ensure that it changes along with your company. Spending time to optimize this page and ensure that all of the correct information is included along with anything else that will give your customers more information is vital to improving your local outreach.
Utilize Social Media
Social signals can be very important when it comes to local and general search rankings. Each time a social media user likes, comments on or shares a post, video or image, it sends an important social signal to Google and other search engines. Not only should you be interacting with as many customers as possible on various social media platforms, you should also ensure that your social media profiles are up to date with your local information.
Optimizing your small business for local SEO is vital to remaining competitive!