Nowadays, it’s very important for small business owners to master local SEO. According to Hubspot,
89% of search engine users use their smartphone(s) to search for a
local business at least once a week. This short local SEO guide will
provide you with a list of very simple and effective things every small
business owner must do to improve their local SEO rankings. Some of them
are:
1) Improve your on-page SEO
Doing
things like adding targeted keywords to your H1 tags and using internal
links can make a huge difference in your search ranking ability. You
should also improve your webpage loading speed, as Google themselves
have said this is, in fact, a signal used to rank pages.
2) Add your business to Google Maps and Bing Places
Google and Bing combined make up over 90% of worldwide searches (source),
so it’s a must that you include your business on Google Maps and Bing
Places if you want to have more geoeconomic search reach. These services
are absolutely free and should take no more than a half-hour to set up
on each platform.
3) Build your local NAP citations
Local
NAP citations are listings of your business in local business data
platforms such as Google My Business, Yelp, Acxiom, Neustar, and many
others. Doing this will also improve your visibility and generate high
authoritative backlinks to your website.
4) Increase backlinks to your website from local authorities
One
of the best ways to improve your online search presence is to get
quality backlinks from local authorities that are already getting a lot
of traffic. Reach out to local authorities in your niche and see what
incentive(s) you can offer that person to promote you on their website (Do not simply ask for them like some marketing advisors will tell you to do. Find a service or product of value you can offer them in exchange for a backlink to your website).
5) Ask your customers or clients to leave reviews
Another
simple, but very effective strategy is to just simply ask for reviews.
The average consumer lives a very busy life, and in the midst of it,
even those with good intentions that love your service will often not
leave any positive reviews of you or your business. Utilize this strategy
and all others mentioned in this short local SEO guide and I promise
you’ll see your local SEO ranking improve in no time.
