According to Google, 46% of all searches are looking for local information. For small businesses, it is important to establish an online presence. Without it, you will be missing out on potential customers who are ready to shop in your area. If you want your business to stay relevant, you should learn SEO.
If you are a small business owner who wants to establish your online presence, this guide is for you. This will contain a comprehensive guide, covering local SEO tips and tools. You will be able to know how to optimize your business to reach potential consumers who use local search to choose which products or services they’re going to buy.
- Optimize for Google My Business.
Google My Business has become the crème de la crème of local search. It is a tool that helps Google feels more comfortable sharing your content because it is verified by Google My Business. To do this, you need to create and verify a Google My Business page. Use Google Posts within your account. You should also encourage your customers to share reviews online. You should also respond authentically to reviews, specifying locations.
- Engage on social media and add posts to Google My Business.
It’s almost becoming a staple that every business has a social media presence. Google considers content shared on social media to be more important today. So after carving out a beautiful Google My Business page, you can share the page on social media to further align social and search.
- Ensure your name, address, and phone number are correct.
You need to make sure you are making it easy for people and search engines to find you. So make sure your name, address, and phone number are included as crawlable HTML on your site. Remember not to include these details as images as they can’t be crawled from search engines, unlike HTML search.
- Optimize online directories and citations.
Verify that your citations are consistent and complete across data aggregators because discrepancies like misspellings, abbreviations, lack of suite number, or wrong phone number can be problematic. Remember that if Google can’t determine which information about your business is correct, it may not show your business at all in search results. Lastly, make sure to remove any duplicate listings you find.
- Perform a local SEO audit.
Once you see that you have tackled the fundamentals down, it’s quite tempting to put your foot on the brake. However, you need to remember that SEO is an ongoing and intuitive process. You need to perform a comprehensive audit to see where your website stands and what you need to work on to achieve your goals. Get a list of this to check and also make sure to do a competitor analysis to check whether your website matches up with the competition. This is very important to gauge your place in the market.
