If you wonder whether your new business will attract any traffic from your neighborhood, chances are it will not unless you create an SEO strategy. The web is a prominent place with billions of websites, each vying to be on the first page of Google results. Why would your small business be catered to on the first page when bigger businesses pay for more comprehensive strategies across the web?
The answer is in this blog post
Why do businesses need local SEO?
Local SEO helps your business appear on the first page in localized search results. Google has reported that 46% of all internet searches are for local information. It is only natural for people to look for local solutions. Moreover, 72% of shoppers visit a store or shop within their own locality after a search, and 88% of people call in a store after searching online. These stats are not just interesting; they are encouraging too. Local SEO helps businesses serve their customers from a physical location, which means if you are a huge business or an online E-commerce store that does not operate in a specific geographical location, then local SEO is not for you. Local SEO for small business by design improves the visibility of small businesses offering or delivering services in specific proximity. Local SEO for a small business involves specific keywords that show your business to consumers looking for information besides online reviews, user locations, mapping, and listings.
Difference between SEO and Local SEO
The difference lies in the scale. Simple SEO strategies focus on paid ads, keywords search, creating in-depth quality content about your product and services, speeding up website load time, and earning backlinks. These strategies ensure your business shows up at the top of the search results. This can eventually result in queries and a revenue stream generating from anywhere.
Local SEO for small businesses relies on local ads, listing services, optimizing profiles, micro-targeting keywords, earning credible reviews, and creating a location-specific copy for the website. The strategy also employs backlinks from local businesses, which helps the business be found and seen locally.
Is there an overlap between the two? Yes, possibly. Although local SEO has a defined set of strategies, it is probable that once your organization employs SEO as a plan, its local SEO improves by default. However, a traditional SEO plan would require tweaking to drive targeted local traffic.
Local SEO for Small Businesses
Why local seo for small business? Businesses like franchises, heavy equipment, real estate, legal, medical and health, and local consumer services can benefit from a localized SEO strategy.
1. Small businesses will gain more traffic and more local conversions to boost their sales than with a traditional plan. Local clicks have high commercial intent. Customers searching locally do so because they have an unfulfilled need. It is known that organic search results receive 75% of the clicks. With a local SEO strategy, your business can feature in the top three can have a high likelihood of conversion.
2. Among the benefits of local seo for small business is the reduced customer acquisition cost. Compared to advertising, a local SEO strategy will help boost your business for keywords that generally have a cost attached to them when used in advertising. If you can rank for a keyword organically, you will be receiving traffic free of cost for that keyword.
3. Local businesses get a boost when someone says something good about them. Imagine that something is online and permanent. Google offers a review system that helps business listings gain helpful comments from their users. As businesses build their review listing, they start to get featured on top of search results.
4. People prefer buying locally. Apart from the shipping times that international stores provide, people want to purchase from stores they can relate to easily, possibly within their neighborhood. As a business, local SEO for small business helps bring in customers looking for local solutions. This also means heightened competition. The only way to attract potential customers is by using a plan that focuses on their needs and wants.
Steps to get you started…
1. Do a local keyword search. You can use a tool like Ubersuggest or Ahrefs to find local SEO keywords specific to your industry, niche, and product. Frequently, these keywords will be associated with geographical locations. You can also look for keywords on Quora and the Related Searches section of Google. Once you have the keywords, decide how you want to incorporate them on your website and blog.
2. Create a Google My Business Profile page. A study by Moz found that the business profile page is one of the highest-ranking factors. However, 58% of business owners haven’t claimed their business pages to date. If your business shows up listed, claim it and add details about your business to it. If you do not find a page about your business, create one using easy steps. Make sure you do not add any keywords to your business profile page. That goes against Google’s guidelines and can cause them to disapprove of your listing.
3. Create an on-page SEO strategy with the keywords you found. Add your keywords to the URL, meta tags, title, and on the page. This strategy works for both seo and local seo for small business.
4. Start to build links with websites that operate locally. You need to backlink to content close to you to rank your website. One of the ways to do it is to write guest posts that link back to your business. The second way is to build content that other businesses would want to link to. Once you are done with creating useful content, reach out to other business owners and ask them to link to it, thus increasing your visibility. This local seo for small business strategy works to build you as a credible voice in your business.
5. Make your website mobile-friendly. 80% of the shoppers use mobile phones to look at products, compare pricing and read reviews. As long as your website has a mobile-friendly interface and loads in record time, you can expect to keep your customer engaged.
And this is just the beginning of how you can optimize your properties for local seo for small business. If in doubt about the process you can look for your nearest local seo services for small business and hit them for information. Local SEO is an evolving process that begins with seemingly simple steps but branches out into fruitful results.
