Do you have a small business struggling to grow and win the competition?
The digital world is so vast that it can feel overwhelming to even exist there. But don’t worry; many small businesses feel the same way, especially at the beginning of their journey.
If you find yourself in this category, you should focus more on local SEO to improve your performance and attract more customers in your geographic area. People are constantly searching online for what they want, and your local customers are no exception.
Nearly 88 percent of enquiries to local businesses result in a phone call or visit within 24 hours. This clearly shows how important it is to employ good local SEO practices and how much potential is lost if you miss this excellent opportunity.
So how can you do this? Here are ten valuable tips to help you get more visitors, attract better leads and turn your leads into loyal customers.
1. Focus On Local Customers
Any good SEO strategy requires that you start your work with relevant keyword research. Local SEO is no exception. Try to look at your website from your customers’ perspective. Think about what they are searching for. Take inspiration from another website with local keywords like yours in another city.
For example, let’s say you have a local coffee shop in Melbourne. Your customer might type in a term like “Melbourne coffee shop” or “best nearby coffee shop in Melbourne” to find you. How can you make sure your customers can find you? You should include your location in these keywords in your SEO strategy.
After that, you are ready to use the keyword list throughout your website and write content with these keywords.
2. Use Local Keywords to Optimise Meta Tags
One of the best ways to optimise your local SEO is to include your keywords in your meta tags. Google (and all other search engines) learn more about what your pages represent from the meta description. Try to use these keywords in the title tags and meta descriptions on all pages, and try to look as natural as possible. This will help your local customers find your page quickly and read your content to the end.
3. Make Your Web Pages Location-Specific
Use some keywords to create some location-specific pages on your website. For example, if you are a welder, in addition to your main welding website, you should also set up some pages for each city where you offer your services. Do not forget to include suburb names. Make sure you also use your location-specific keywords in the content of each new page. This will increase the chance that the page will appear on the first results page.
4. Don’t Forget to Optimise URLs on New Web Pages
When creating new location-specific pages, be sure to optimise the URLs. Often, URLs are overlooked by SEO experts. However, they play a critical role in ranking your site in search results. Google checks your URLs as a signal to know what your website is about. Without optimised URLs, search engines cannot provide users with accurate and relevant results.
5. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
Since you always have your mobile phone, most people use it to find what they are looking for. Therefore, you need to consider mobile users to optimise your local SEO. People are 61 percent more likely to contact a business with a mobile-friendly website. So, use this helpful tip to prevent losing a large portion of your customers.
6. Create Local Content Strategically
When writing content for your blog or social media, have a local focus. Try writing about local events or discussing the history of your neighbourhood. Another factor that can help you achieve SEO is networking with other local businesses. You can take advantage of them for an extra SEO boost.
7. Don’t Keep Your Users Waiting
Dial-up connections and agonisingly slow download times have long been passé. Users are becoming increasingly impatient and expect to be able to use the Internet almost immediately. To satisfy this vital need, you, too, need to shorten your load times. If your website loads slowly and sluggishly (especially on mobile devices), it can lead to a higher bounce rate. So, if you don’t want to make it easy for your competitors, you should correct slow-loading pages as soon as possible.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights is the easiest tool to determine the speed of your pages and get practical optimization tips.
8. Monitor Your Online Reviews & Develop a Strategy
Your potential customers will check your online reviews before choosing your business. Try to develop a solid strategy to keep track of online reviews. How? You can start by asking your customers to write positive reviews to improve your online rating. If you are not completely satisfied with your reviews, you should respond to them publicly. If you take care of an unhappy customer, your website visitors will likely forgive a bad review.
9. Create & Complete Your Google My Business Profile
Creating a Google My Business profile is essential to provide Google with the necessary information. It’s not just about text search, but voice search as well. So if you don’t fill out your Google My Business profile, your potential customers won’t be able to find you when they ask their device, “Where’s the nearest coffee shop?” Fill out the required information and update it regularly. It only takes a few minutes, but it can be critical to your business and significantly impact your web traffic.
10. Keep Monitoring Your Local Results
You should move slowly and steadily to win the race here. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to local search engine optimization, so you must tailor your strategy to what works best for your business. Try to refine your strategy by making incremental and minor adjustments to create an effective website for your customers. Constantly monitor your metrics or hire an expert to do so. Analytics will help you do this.
Final Word on Local SEO
It takes time to improve your local SEO. As a business owner, you may be too busy to do it all yourself. You can rely on our team to implement your local SEO and increase traffic.
At BroadWeb Digital, we can help your business grow by helping you sell more and generate more leads.
