WASHINGTON — If you’re running a local retail or service business, you want to make sure consumers, particularly in your locale, can actually find you. To get in the game, competitive businesses already know they need to have an available, informative and attractive website to market their wares. But potential cutomers need to be able to find that webiste online via their search engine of choice. To get those local customers in the door, local businesses must adopt local small business SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques.
Local small business SEO methodologies help optimize your website using online marketing techniques to make it rank better and higher on Google feeds and search results that reach local audiences who inpu5 words or phrases relevant your site’s content.
The success of small businesses in today’s world of digital technology increasingly depends on how visible and easy-to-find they are via search engine results. The big question: Will your business get one of the top links on a search; or will the winner be one of your market competitors instead?
Do you wish to be on the foremost line of search? Check out the 5 most important things you need to address via small business SEO to put your business on top of any relevant local search results.
Build a quality website
First and foremost, your business needs to have a fully functional website online and in full operation. Surprisingly, even today, many small businesses don’t have one. But to even get noticed by prospective customers, and to enhance your online presence and availability, you simply must have in a top-quality website. Or invest in one as soon as possible. Your site must be adequately designed, accessible and audience-friendly. The success of your business frequently depends not only on your site’s attractiveness, relevence and each of use. It depends, perhaps even more, on how internet search engines see it. To use search engine shoptalk, your website must be crawlable by search engine “spiders,” but also understandable and user-friendly.
Develop a new Local Small Business SEO Profile
To enhance your online SEO presence, first make certain you’ve already posted a top-notch local business profile for your company or business. It’s astonishing just how many businesses – even large ones – are available via online website that lack basic information like a local address, contact email addresses and phone numbers, and favorable reviews via reliable review websites. How many users will end up contacting these businesses?
You can easily avoid this error. Create your business profile by modeling it on well-ranked profiles for other companies. You can find representative samples on popular review websites such as TripAdvisor or Yelp. It doesn’t matter whether you read reviews relevant to your specific business area. What does matter is that you discover successful patterns in business sites that achieve the top rankings. After all, there’s no point in re-inventing the wheel. The same approach that hits the jackpot for other companies can also work for you.
Also, when developing your new or revised local business SEO profile, find out what words, phrases and terminology are routinely deployed by top-ranked businesses similar to yours. Further, find out what information sources or online directories are related to your business. Don’t forget to look for local online directories as well in this process, if available. If you can interest, affiliate with or join a few of these, your business can be highlighted there. It can subsequently be linked back to your own site. Implementing what useful information you find can almost certainly bring you out of the “invisible zone.” That enables more consumers to discover your site and your business.
Create top-quality content with targeted keywords
Google regards quality content as one of its top three ranking criteria. Content you post on your website should always be top quality and full of useful and easy-to-understand information. These qualities distinguish your site from other competitors.
Inasmuch as you create robust and useful content, you must also make sure that content amply contains important business- and product-targeted keywords. These further improve and increase your ranking on the search engines. But never overuse keywords in your text, thinking this can improve your search engine ranking. Search engines long ago built in technologies that readily detect such unnecessary keyword overloading, called “keyword stuffing.” So by all means, do use keywords. But use them artfully. And use them to make your content concise, specific and easy to comprehend.
Collect and gather reviews
Positive reviews help improve and boost your availability and visibility on local search engines. Research conducted by Moz, suggests that online product and service reviews play a vital role in consumer awareness. Such review results contribute approximately 10% of the positives influencing how search engines discover and rank search results.
To encourage customers to give your company a good review, make provisions to link reviews to your website and to other online profiles. Also encourage your employees to as satisfied customers to consider writing reviews. Attractive and informative online reviews prove among the most reliable ways your business can appeal to existing customers. Or encourage new ones to give your company a try.
Make use of quality links
Finally, to attract or increase the number of eyeballs finding you via search engine results, you must work on developing quality links to quality website. This enhances your site’s reputation. Every good search result involves such high quality links to other websites. Ensure that along with the top-notch content you create and post on influencer websites, you embed links back to your site—preferably via hyperlinks. In no small measure, this can up your game and increase your visibility in every search result.
Conclusion
Small business SEO is one of the most important ways you can grow your business via your online presence. No matter how small your SEO investment is, if you put today’s 5 tips into action, you can become a force in your business and a top choice for local online consumers. When you rank well in search results, you know that your marketing strategy is paying off. And you also know that you’ll soon be on your way to reaping the benefits all small businesses need to achieve: greater benefits for customers and higher profitability for your business as well.
About the author:
Through his company, Joel House Search media, Joel House helps small to medium businesses grow their revenues through increased search traffic.
— Headline image: Image by William Iven from Pixabay. CC 0.0 license.
