For anyone doing anything marketing-related, knowledge about SEO strategies is an absolute must. SEO, however, entails a broad spectrum of strategies, and one that can easily get overlooked is local SEO. Local SEO strategy is an effective way for small businesses to have a chance against more established brands because it makes the fight fair and square. Much of the internet traffic generated is organic and comes from local searches, so the price paid for overlooking local SEO is often a smaller conversion rate from leads to customers.
Step up your Google My Business profile game
Creating and optimizing your Google My Business (GMB) profile is key to creating a successful local SEO strategy. GMB is an online directory that allows customers to find verified, accurate, and relevant information about a business in their area and rank them based on certain metrics. Once you create an account, which is a fairly straightforward process, make sure to add any and all relevant information about your business.
Fill in all the required information, but don’t stop there; add extra information wherever possible and include photos and videos of both the location of your business and any products that you may offer. Once that’s done, you can get information about your rank via a specialized local rank checker. Your job here is far from done, however, because this information should be regularly updated, and posting about promotions, deals, and discounts is a great way to interact with your customers and raise their interest. Another way you can interact with your customers is by encouraging reviews and replying to them, as they will help you build a reputation of credibility and trustworthiness.
Local keywords for local SEO
No SEO exists without keywords, and the same rule applies to local SEO. That’s why conducting research about the keywords your customers might search for when looking for your business is absolutely essential in making your business easy to find. As a starting point, you can start by asking yourself what your customers might often include in a search; then, use the internet to see what the most searched-for keywords in your particular industry are.
Since this is local SEO, localized keywords such as the name of a city, neighborhood, or locality might be of use as well. Once you find the exact keywords you need, strategically include them in your website and content, and let the search engine algorithms take care of the rest. Of course, you’ll want to track your progress and adapt accordingly. For this purpose, you can use specific online tools to track the effectiveness of your keywords and acquire data about metrics such as visibility, search volume, and position.
Do you even exist without social media?
Nowadays, an essential part of any marketing strategy is the support it gets from your social media presence. Social media is a wonderful way to acquire organic traffic and turn leads into conversions. Activity on any social media is useless though, unless your target audience sees it, which is why you’ll want to create a customer persona and choose to be active on social media they are on as well. Whichever set of social media you choose, you’ll want to have cross-platform consistency and post content that your customers find valuable.
Backlinking! Once again for those in the back
You can think of backlinks as recommendations for your website, which are a great way of increasing your credibility not just with your customers, but also with Google itself, and backlinking is the process of adding backlinks to your site from other prominent pages and websites. This way, other websites that are linked to your own generate organic traffic.
As for getting these recommendations, there is no shortage of ways as you can write articles and guest blog posts in which you can add backlinks to your websites as well as ask for backlinks from those who are already successful in your industry. You can even backlink to other websites and create a reciprocal backlinking relationship with another brand.
The more, the merrier
Although we’ve already mentioned how reviews can help you increase your local SEO strategy, their importance is easily overlooked in favor of some more complicated methods. But the thing is, quality reviews, both positive and negative are one of the best ways to skyrocket your visibility. To get these reviews, you can ask your customers, both new and old, to leave a review through follow-up emails. Once they leave a review, be sure to respond in such a way that you present your business in a positive light.
Finally, although all of these methods help, even if you apply all of them today, you can’t expect your results to improve overnight. The success warranted by a high-quality SEO strategy takes time, so arm yourself with patience.
