Denisa Lamaj
Imagine you own a local store in a small town, and right across the street is your competitor performing better than you.
While you are sitting in your office and wondering why things aren’t working out for you.
You go to Google and type in your competitor’s name in your local area and discover that your competitor is showing up as the first result, while your business… It’s nowhere to be found.
That’s our main goal for this article. Whether you are a total beginner to local SEO or not getting the results from your local SEO efforts.
I’m going to walk you through how to get your local business to rank higher on search engines and get more customers.
SEO is the process of optimizing your online presence to attract more business from relevant local searches.
For example, if you type in “the best Mediterranean restaurant in Italy,” you will see that the top of the search results is dominated by a box of local listings on Google Maps. And below that are your typical organic search results.
It’s super important that you can gain a position in the “Snack Pack” because they generate 33% of clicks on the search results page.
According to Google, 76% of people who conducted a local search on their smartphone visited a business within 24 hours, and 28% of those searches resulted in a purchase.
So, that’s why local SEO is important in this day. Even the older generation may do a Google search before visiting a store. Read below for more benefits:
When you run a business that gets a lot of local traffic and uses a broad SEO strategy, you risk a lot of visits that don’t go anywhere. For instance, let’s say you’ve written a blog post with helpful hints about your product or service. Then you should use local targets to avoid an audience from all over the world.
Customers believe that high-ranking businesses have been evaluated by Google and can be relied upon. Your audience will respect and trust your business more if you get a prominent position on the results page. In addition, this high position makes you appear to be an authority in your field and increases your level of appeal.
An increase in traffic accompanies a rise in sales. Being an authority in your area will increase your chances of being the destination for local customers who are ready to buy.
Local searchers who are not yet ready to buy will be encouraged by your proximity and optimal availability. Instead of finding businesses far away or requiring them to buy blindly online, they can visit you and get to know you as a local.
Even if you are a local business, you can’t rely on location, traffic, and word of mouth alone. You need to adopt a strategy to grow your business online and turn your leads into customers.
Here’s how to do local SEO for your business:
Define the search terms for which you would like your business to rank. This will be primarily determined by the goods and/or services you offer.
Before beginning the optimization process, you must first determine whether your website has a solid foundation and what issues can be found.
Any technical or on-page SEO problems that could limit your website’s success can be identified with an SEO audit. Before you worry about creating new SEO content or building backlinks, you should address these issues.
The on-page optimization process involves the following:
Geotargeting is a highly effective marketing strategy for small local businesses or sales teams. When customers are clustered within a specific area, it doesn’t make sense to target everyone.
Thankfully most marketing channels provide tools to refine advertisements and other content based on location.
First up, social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have built-in tools that allow you to segment your ads by location by default.
They typically select the country you’re based in, but if you’re a local business, you might want to just select the city in which you’re based.
Geotargeting options include country, state, region, city, or even the zip code where you are based. If your company has multiple locations or service areas. You can also refine by radius or select multiple locations to target.
Next up, paid search advertising through platforms like google ads have similar targeting capabilities with one distinct. You can advertise in the maps listings by linking your location from Google My Business, which will also place your location at the top of Google Maps. This is especially helpful for local businesses that have few competitors who are ranking higher organically.
Pages designed specifically for ranking in local organic search are known as localized landing pages.
Having optimized H1, H2, and H3 headings, and writing keyword-optimized body content, are best practices for creating landing pages. You should also include internal links, and images, and optimize your landing pages for mobile search.
If done correctly, you can also use paid ads to drive organic and paid traffic to these landing pages. Just make sure to include compelling calls to action to get people to get in touch with you.
If you want to rank your local business higher in Google, you need backlinks. Link building is getting contextually relevant websites to link to a page on your website. And local link building is the same thing, but with one additional but very important layer.
Ideally, you want to get backlinks from both contextually and locally relevant pages to your website.
For example, let’s say you’re a photographer in Toronto and want to get backlinks to your site. Getting a link from a page on how to take good pictures would certainly be contextually relevant.
Now, the good thing about local SEO when it comes to backlinks is that there won’t be as much competition because you’re competing with local players. But the downside is that you may need to get more creative in finding link prospects because there will likely be fewer targets compared to a site doing global SEO.
The first thing you need to do is set up Google My Business. When you submit your corporate information, you’re much more likely to get placed there. To visit your Business Profile Manager. You can either click on your business profiles or you can visit business.google.com. From there, you can optimize your google profile.
Just imagine yourself as a customer when you are doing research on businesses you want to be in contact with.
I’m pretty sure you want to see images of the business, its staff at work, happy customers, etc. It gives a personal touch, and it enhances the trust level between you and the business even before you reach out to them.
To do so, you should definitely add images related to your business, your location, your products and your staff at work.
Also, ask your customers permission to use their images on your business profile. All of these will be visible whenever your business appears on the local pack.
Google my business will help you get into the top tier. It will help you establish a good business reputation through reviews and other features.
We all know that competition is tough. No matter what industry you are in. So we always look for ways to stand out from the crowd, and one of them is to schedule posts on Google my business and include links to your website or other social media platforms.
A business is based on its reputation, and this is the primary reason why you must collect positive reviews from your customers in the first place. The other critical reason is that google reviews play a key part in how well your business listing ranks on google maps.
First, getting positive reviews will give you a clear advantage, as customers always look for the best.
Second, if customers include relevant keywords you are targeting in their reviews, it will also help you rank for those words.
Third, the more reviews you get, the better. If you have a lot of reviews, it shows that you have been around for a long time and that your services are always of high quality.
We recommend contacting every customer you do business with and asking them for a review. This is recommended by Google also, so don’t feel like you are begging. Send your customers an email encouraging them to include relevant keywords in their reviews.
Whether you are a total beginner to local SEO or not getting the results from your local SEO efforts.
Now over to you. Do you think getting your business to rank in local search results is important? Let us know in the comments below!
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