Everyday that goes by, there are more people searching the worldwide web for companies like yours. In fact, looking for goods and services on the worldwide web has become so prevalent that eMarketer estimates consumers will spend $1.5 trillion on goods and services in 2014. With 93% of all online experiences starting with search engines, it goes without saying you need to engage in smart search engine optimization strategies if you want to have any hope of being noticed and growing your revenue online. However, especially if you’re a small business, general SEO services aren’t enough to bring in the traffic you need to thrive. That’s where local SEO strategies come into play.
What is Local Search Optimization?
As defined by Search Engine Journal, local SEO strategies are the method of creating, publishing, and optimizing web content for consumers in specific geographic locations. So, say, for example, you run a comic shop in the heart of Tucson. Ideally, you’d want your local SEO strategies to be about building online content that points to your shop in the city. As you can probably guess, this is a really powerful way to generate local foot traffic for the small business owners who need it most.
Four Effective Local SEO Strategies for Small Businesses
- Build Your Local Place Pages
- Guest Blog, but Be Careful!
- Optimize Your Yelp! Page, and Encourage Its Use
- Go Mobile!
For Forbes, the single best thing you can do to improve the efficacy of a local SEO campaign is claim and build your local place pages. These are those pages you see to the side of search results when you search for businesses in Google and elsewhere. You can optimize a free page with Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Make sure you include your location, hours, a brief SEO optimized blurb, and pictures for the best results.
Guest blogging has long been seen as an incredibly effective way of building business-to-business relations, while simultaneously growing your user-base by demonstrating your value through knowledge. As Search Engine Journal writes, however, recent changes to Google have made it clear that there is bad guest blogging and good guest blogging. The former has to do with guest blogging on sites that effectively farm that content for you, with the latter focusing on providing quality, engaging content for web surfers. Yes, you should guest blog, but you need to be smart about it.
Even though webizens are not above leaving libelous reviews about your business online for the fun of it, the fact is you should be encouraging your customers to leave reviews about your business on sites like Yelp! Good or bad, writes Search Engine Watch, reviews represent a great PR and SEO opportunity. If reviews are good, you can simply thank customers for their kind words and taking the time to leave a review. If they’re bad, you can use Yelp! as a platform for demonstrating your commitment to customer service. Optimize your Yelp! page to gain access to this win-win.
According to Pew Research, 91% of Americans own a cellphone and 63% of those people use their phones to surf the web. In fact, they are one of the biggest drivers of eCommerce. If you want to increase your online presence, be sure to optimize your page and content for mobile users.
Do you have any additional local SEO strategies our readers can use to get ahead? Let us know in the comment section below! Good references here: www.morepro.com
