Top Strategies to Improve Your Local SEO – Local SEO is the determining factor for the success of a business. Even retailers first build up their influence in the neighborhood before expanding globally. We could say that local SEO is a strong base that your business needs. Today’s goal is to discuss various strategies to improve your local SEO and raise awareness about your business.
Why is local SEO important for your business?
When you start a business, your first customers are the people who live the closest to your location. Many businesses start selling to friends and family and expand sales to their neighbors. The local neighborhood is a valuable pool of loyal customers you should not push aside.
Even if we look at shopping from a customer perspective, everyone focuses on looking for stores in their neighborhood. No one wants to travel to get something they can buy across the street.
By adding a location to your SEO optimization, you are focusing on targeting the people closest to your business.
With that in mind, local SEO can focus on different areas, like neighborhoods or a city. You really want to grab the attention of your local customers because they will build your business.
What are the best strategies to improve your local SEO?
When we talk about various strategies that will help you to build local SEO, you have a lot to choose from. However, some approaches are more efficient than others. The most successful strategies we can advise are:
- utilize business listings;
- optimize the website for a mobile platform;
- gather customer reviews;
- make use of citations;
- be active on social media;
- do local link building;
Let’s talk about how these strategies can increase the traffic to your website and bring your more business.
What are business listings?
Business listings are websites or apps that collect information about local businesses. The best example is Google My Business, but other examples include Facebook, Apple Maps, Yelp, Bing, LinkedIn Company Director, etc.
The power of these platforms is in helping businesses reach out to their local audience. You can create your company profile and add the company name, location, contact information, working hours, and price range. This will help people in the area find your business more efficiently.
Keep in mind that, among many ways to not only drive more traffic to your online business but also spread the awareness of your company, business directories play the top role in local SEO.
Go mobile
Optimizing your website for mobile is not an option. This is a crucial step you should not skip. Everyone uses mobile phones when shopping – especially when researching where to shop.
Customers like to use mobile phones because it is easy to find all the vital information about a business. If you take your phone now and do a Google search for a product, you will see a list of companies on the right side of the screen, where different companies are listed. You have the website, phone number, working hours, location – everything is there. The benefits of using a mobile phone for your search are just too many. The next natural step is to use the phone to visit the website. That’s why it is a necessity to make your website mobile-friendly.
The power of customer reviews
One good review can be worth a lot more than you could think. People like to shop based on recommendations. Some people always look for recommendations from their friends and family or even on online forums.
Another reason why reviews are so powerful is that they allow you to connect with the customers and get their feedback. You can also communicate directly and build a conversation. This is an excellent advertisement for future customers because they will see you are engaged. If you are searching for the best strategies to improve your local SEO, you should always give your customers the time of the day.
The efficiency of citations
Citations are mentions of your business in other sources. For example, if a guest blogger writes a review of your product and links back to your home page, mentioning the company name, that will do wonders for your SEO – especially if you add the location.
Citations can show Google that your business plays an essential part in that region, and your website rating will go up. It is a fact that your business depends on online marketing. It’s not that other marketing strategies are not efficient. But, online marketing has the most expansive outreach, and it is relatively cheap when compared to other options.
Be active on social media
Social media platforms are very popular for doing business today. If you want to shop in your neighborhood, you could search for any product and get a lot of suggestions.
Social media is also fantastic for public exposure and building customer communication. Furthermore, if you create local shareable content, you can easily share it with your followers, and they will share the content with their friends. That’s how you grow a network of customers and give essential local exposure to your business.
Local link building
Link building is one of the most successful strategies for getting on the first page of Google. You can do it through blogging, citations, social media, business listings, and many other strategies. What you need to do is to focus more on local link building. That means working on regional keywords that include the name of your city or your neighborhood. Do an SEO audit and make sure your essential keywords contain the location. That’s the crucial step.
Make sure your website is operational
Many websites are built on WordPress, and there are fantastic SEO plugins that make website optimization easier. You want your website always to work perfectly. It is easy to lose all the clients’ attention if customers encounter broken pages or the website is running slow. That’s why your WP website speed affects your ranking more than you can imagine. Moreover, this is one of the factors that affect the bounce rate the most. Take care of your website to improve customer experience.
Local SEO is the key to the success of your business
We showed you a couple of different approaches. What you should do is mix these strategies to improve your local SEO. That’s how you will get the best results. Remember that the change does not happen overnight. Just be patient, connect with your clients, and slowly build the exposure.
