SEO For Local Business
Improving the SEO of your website is one of the best things you can do for a local business. If done well it will make it easier for prospective customers to find you and can be a real asset to your business.
Unfortunately, most small business owners and their employees don’t have the time to keep up on the effort required to get the benefits of search engine optimization.
In this blog post, we will explore four SEO tips for local businesses. These SEO techniques are a great way to improve your website SEO and generate more traffic from organic search engine results pages.
Before you can improve your sites SEO – you must first understand the purpose of SEO and what it actually is.
SEO can be a very technical and complicated topic – and for very competitive keywords it’s worth knowing and implementing. For most businesses there’s a much simpler way to think about SEO.
The simplest way to think about SEO is what questions are people asking Google about your business and how are they asking them? What is their search intent when they search Google?
It’s that simple.
“Doing” SEO at its simplest form is thinking about what questions might be asked that are relevant to you business, and creating / organizing the information on your website that makes it easy for Google to find and display in search results.
The goal of SEO for local business is simple – to get more organic “free” referrals from Google ultimately resulting in online sales or visits to brick and mortar locations.
Local SEO for Business
This is where local SEO efforts can stand apart from SEO for other types of websites. You have to think about your business in the context of what questions would be asked by someone looking to find you.
Tip #1 – SEO For Local Businesses: Decide on Local Search Keywords
Perhaps the most important tip is simply contemplating what questions people might be asking about our company and creating a list of keywords that are related to those questions. Without knowing this information you won’t be able to effectively create content to answer their questions.
These should be local keywords to give you the best odds of ranking.
Tip #2 – SEO For Small Businesses: Organize On Page Keywords
Once you have your initial list of keywords, you’ll want to include some of the keywords and phrases throughout your website that are relevant, but don’t over do it or stuff them into every paragraph. There are tools like YOAST that can plugin directly to your website to help you effectively organize this information.
There’s lots of fine tuning that can be done on each page, but the main elements are:
- Good title – that references the keyword you are targeting
- A good meta description – that references the keyword you are targeting
- Created a relevan featured image for the page with relevant alt tag referencing the targeted keyword.
- A minimum of 300 words
- Use H2 and H3 tags – also relevant to your keyword.
This gives you a higher probability of being included in Google’s search engine listings (SERPs). This is the search box results people see and happens most frequently with blogs / articles, FAQs and relevant local landing pages.
Including a good SEO title and description for these pages will help you improve the seo performance of those landing pages, leading to better rankings in SERPs – which should lead to more organic referrals from search engines!
Local SEO Tip #3 – For Local Businesses: Crosslink to other pages
Another tip for improving your local SEO is to link to other relevant areas on your website. By connecting these “internal” links, you make it easier for Google to “crawl” and discover content that might otherwise go unseen. You can also use this cross linking to other local keywords.
In addition to Google seeing your other pages, it also provides a link for customers to discover the new information as well.
This applies to external links to other relevant sites as well. Perhaps you can recommend or reference other local sites?
Tip #4 – SEO For Local Businesses: More Output
The last tip for improving your local SEO is to consistently add more content to your website. For example, this would typically be articles or blog posts, but it could be keyword specific landing pages as well.
Committing to regularly create local content has 2 benefits.
- More frequent updates to your website, let’s Google know to check your site for new information more often.
- You expand and strengthen the keywords you rank for, which helps your website get seen more when customers are looking.
If you do a really good job of creating compelling content you might find that you start to attract links from other sites and local blogs, while also building brand awareness and a stronger local presence. This link building reinforces the importance of your site to Google and can increase your ranking from inbound links.
In Closing
SEO for small businesses can be an affordable and powerful way to grow your business, but it does require effort. As a result, many times we’ve seen owner’s planning to do the work, but it never gets done.
Local leads, coming from local searches, with local intent can be among the highest converting prospects available. Which makes it worth the effort to build specific local content. Therefore, local searchers are more likely to buy from you, than someone across the country. Consequently, too many brick and mortar businesses ignore this.
Get The Work Done For You
To help local business owner get the work done, we created a WordPress Management service. This service was desingned to help with things like local business SEO and keeping your site running safe and secure.
