Marketing and optimizing your business website for online success follows the tried and tested routines of having your site indexed on google and then ensuring that your website’s relevance in the search rankings goes up with time. Going after site ranking on search engines is not the most important aspect of SEO. Yes, it will ensure that you get more organic search traffic directed at your website, but the quality and significance of the traffic are equally important.
To get maximum bang for your buck, you have to ensure that your SEO efforts are not only smart but ensure that your allocated budget is effectively utilized to maximize performance. Thousands of dollars of marketing budgets will not get you anywhere if you do not follow the correct SEO roadmap designated for your online business. This crossroad is where small business websites have a huge opportunity to score big in search optimization and traffic. Optimizing your website for local search offers small business highly targeted results and a huge uplift in business-relevant traffic and conversions.
Local SEO reaches local customers in your designated business location. This not only adds to your business popularity; it gives a significant boost to ROI and conversions. Being on top of the local search results improves the relevancy of your business operation and helps in reaching actual customers. With the high proliferation of mobile and social commerce, local search optimization is critical for succeeding in the online sales race.
If you want your small business to be relevant, trustworthy, popular and generate sales, then the following local search initiatives will enable your website to attain its business goals.
1. Update Your Google Business Information
Review your business information submitted on Google My Business, with special attention to the address, business hours, locations, website address, and contact information. Update and add relevant photos of your small business location as well. Your correct business profile ensures that your business appears on top of local searches on Google Search and Google Maps. Keep your reviews section engaging and updated to gain significant relevancy in local search results.
2. Local Website SEO
Your website SEO, particularly the home page and landing page SEO must be focused to improve your website’s relevancy in local search results. Focus on the relevant title, description and meta tags for every page with a clear indication about the products or services being offered, and the available business locations for the same. Ensure that all content showcased is relevant to the business objectives and aligns with information submitted to your Google Business account.
3. Build Local Citations
Your small business will be accorded more relevancy in local search results with citations from local business directories and online citation sites and platforms. Getting your NAPW (your business name, address, phone number, and website) created and featured on the most relevant platforms vastly improves your local search rankings. This is also important when being relevant over your competitors offering similar products and services. Best sites for local citation are facebook.com, yahoo.com, bbb.org,yelp.com, mapquest.com, opentable.com, angieslist.com, here.com,yellowpages.com, etc.
4. Social Media Integration
Building relevancy and ranking on local search is substantially helped by synchronized social media campaigns. Your connected social media feeds must use business-relevant keywords and content so that it is optimized across platforms. Social media posts can get you the mileage you need to connect with more customers and cross optimize your local business website to build trust and reach a bigger audience. Your social media posts contribute towards your unstructured citations and back-link development and improve your local search optimization.
5. Locally Relevant Content
In optimization, content is king and building locally relevant content for your website is critical for local search optimization. Focus on developing content, which is both industries focused and locally applicable, so that you can reach targeted local audiences. Don’t look at it in terms of selling your products, its more about getting audiences interested and aware about your business and offerings. Keep churning out content on relevant local news, events and useful information via blogs, social media and video sharing platforms like YouTube, to reach a bigger audience.
6. Reviews & Ratings
It’s no secret that Google pays a lot of attention to reviews and ratings and being on the good side of this can significantly boost your local search rankings. Ask for reviews on your Google Business Listing, create specific links for customers to review your website and products, send review links with your customer support emails, provide incentives to customers for generating positive reviews and carefully manage and monitor all reviews. Good reviews and ratings make your business look good and trustworthy to potential customers, and in turn, lead to higher local search rankings.If you want your small business website to stand out from the competition and become successful, then local search optimization is the way to go. With over 46% of Google searches being localized, your relevancy in local search results, and growing and managing your online business depends on being relevant in your local business area.