When running a small business, you want to reach as wide an audience as possible. In order for that to happen, you need to work on your marketing. From covering offline methods like billboards and TV ads to focusing on email marketing and social media, there are many things you can do to increase your impact. Something else that you should not overlook in this digital age is search engine optimisation. In fact, local SEO is what will help you the most when trying to appeal to a local audience. Here are some tips that should boost your rankings.
Claim and optimise your Google My Business listing
For starters, it’s important that you claim your Google My Business listing. This is very important as GMB signals play a big role in local rankings. Create a Google account for your company and add essential information like your contact email and business category. Then, you want to further optimise your profile by adding your logo, photos of your premises and products, address, phone number, work hours, and website address. Ensure all this information is correct to not get penalised.
Something else you want to include is keywords that are relevant to your company. Pro-tip: adding photos can really boost your visibility. Businesses that include images lead customers to their website 35% more than those that don’t.
Add accurate citations
Another thing to do is add accurate business citations. This might sound complicated, but it actually simply entails typing in information like name, address, and phone number that will be displayed online when someone looks you up. These can be found on social media profiles, business directory sites like GMB, event listings, and online newspaper stories.
If these details are not synced or are outdated, you are sending mixed messages to search engines, which can result in a lower ranking. This is an easy step you can do to boost your SEO.
Use business structured markup
You may have noticed that you can find important information on Google simply by doing a search, without having to click on a website. For instance, you can see a business’s address, phone, or opening hours.
As you also want to be helpful to any potential customer, you want to add schema markup code to your website, which will tell search engines everything they need to know. There are many freely available tools available online that can assist you with this.
Manage your customer reviews
Customer reviews are one of the most important ranking factors for any business website. How many reviews you get, how often, how many positive ones you have compared to the negative ones, and how many of them use relevant keywords all play a key role.
Ask your customers to leave you reviews, be timely with your responses, thank them for the feedback, and see how you can use this information to improve your company.
Make your website responsive and fast-loading
Another big part of improving your SEO efforts is making your website mobile-friendly. Many customers nowadays search on mobile and if they see that your website is not optimised properly, they will leave and look for a better alternative. That means that you have to look for local experts that will make your website top-notch.
For example, if you’re located in New South Wales, you can find reliable companies for web design in Sydney that will provide you with a quality online presentation. Moreover, your website should be fast-loading, so think about compressing images and cutting down on various page add-ons.
Localise your website
Website localisation is something you can also easily do. If you have only one brick-and-mortar store, you should simply add your full address to the footer of the page. Include local keywords into titles and content as well.
On the other hand, if you have more locations, you want a landing page for each premise, which will include the precise address, phone number, and other information.
Produce authoritative content
To be relevant locally, you also want to produce content that will appeal to the local audience. Therefore, you need a blog where you can post articles and videos that can be of use to your readers and potential customers. By providing them with quality content that uses local keywords, you will also build authority in the niche and local market, which can be very helpful in attracting more people.
You will need to invest some time and effort into this, so if you don’t think you can handle it on your own, turn to expert writers. It’s also crucial to dedicate time to creating backlinks to your website.
Use title and meta descriptions
While meta descriptions will not help with your search engine optimisation efforts, they can help improve local search visibility. As it shows a little snippet of your website, it can encourage viewers to actually open your website and, in that way, get you more traffic.
You want unique meta descriptions that are about 160 characters long for each page of your website. Use local keywords and phrases to target the customers in your area.
Monitor your performance and adjust your approach accordingly
As is the case with any marketing strategy, you want to keep track of it and see if it’s performing how you want it to. Monitor what is working and what isn’t so that you know which aspects you need to adjust. Use a local rank tracker to check your position regularly and tweak your approach accordingly.
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