Local SEO is one of the best ways to get your business up and running in a specific geographic location. Many small businesses are leaving many potential customers on the table because they don’t know how to maximize their local presence within search engines. Whether you use a third-party app or drive traffic directly to your site, this tutorial will show you how to make sure that you are always showing up for every customer within 5 miles.
Whatever your specific business is, whether you are looking to trade locally or sell locally, this tutorial will show you how to:
- Evaluate the best ways to target your customers (and search competitors) using location data only.
- Understand which pages and keywords should be driving traffic directly to your storefront or local classifieds.
- Understand how to make sure people see your offer on the right page as well as the right time of day.
There are some different methods and tools you can use to find out what is available in a particular area.
Plan Your Search:
Before you can even begin to build a marketing campaign, you need to know what it is that you want to achieve. This may seem like a silly question, but in order for your business to be successful, you need to have a clear understanding of what you expect.
If your goal is just local retail sales only, I recommend doing some research on the thousands of stores that are in your area. There are many tools out there that will allow you to use Google Maps or Bing Maps directly on your phone or computer. In particular, the website “Local Data” will show you all types of information about businesses in a specific area and how they are ranked on search engines.
Get Your Business Listed:
One of the most common mistakes that I see small businesses doing is getting angry with the search engines for ranking their competition above them. Chances are if you want to be on par with your competition, you need to make sure that your business shows up on the search engines first. Just because your competition has been around longer doesn’t mean they automatically deserve to be ranked ahead of you. In order to compete with your local competitors, you will need to make sure that you have a presence in the local search results.
Get Your Business Rated:
With so much information available on a company, you need to make sure that you are using the right resources. When it comes to the local search engines, I have found that Yelp is one of the most useful and accurate. After all, why would you rate a business if you didn’t? Just make sure that your rating isn’t too low because even if your place is terrible, it will be hard for them to keep their business going if they have low ratings.
Automate Your Business:
Even though there is so much information online about local SEO, doing all of this manually can drive some businesses insane and cause them to lose focus. In order to not only increase efficiency but also make sure that your business sticks around, you need to automate as much of it as possible. I have found many success stories with local SEO, but the ones that fail are the ones that try to do everything on their own. A simple way of automating this process is by using a third-party review system like “Yelp” or “Google Places”.
Localize Your Website:
The next step you need to take is to make sure that people who land on your website can find precisely what they are looking for within seconds. The best way to do this is through the use of a “geo-targeted landing page”.
There are 3 ways to Improve SEO i.o. Website Audit, Keyword Research ,and Individualized Strategy.
Website Audit: A thorough website audit will show you the strengths of your website and help you determine where to start.
Keyword Research: When searching for keywords, do not go straight to Google Keywords and other major keyword research tools. Instead, try using competitive analysis tools like AdWords Keyword Tool to increase the accuracy of your research.
Individualized Strategy: After doing thorough keyword research, you should create a fully individualized strategy that perfectly fits the needs of your customers. Your strategy can be implemented through on-page SEO, off-page SEO, local SEO, and creating more opportunities through paid advertising.
Conclusion:
Consistent and thorough research is a must before starting out the local SEO. The results of the research can be disastrous if you don’t take into consideration the differences between the local market and the search engine algorithms.
Start your business from where there are few competitors you can beat without investing a lot in high-end marketing tools like SEM and pay-per-click advertising services.
Advance your business by paying for local ads with Electronic Flyers, Yellow Pages, Zillow Ads, Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, etc. Just start from where there are no competitors you can beat.
