Local SEO for small business can be a layered and complicated task involving a lot of attention and manpower. Even after the initial setup is complete, local SEO can require ongoing monitoring and optimization to perform at its peak. Because most local businesses have many competitors, it is crucial for a business to pay thorough attention to its local SEO efforts so that customers in their area looking for a product or service can find their business quickly and easily.
In this post, we go over just some of the ways a small business can improve their local SEO efforts, and in turn, their website traffic quantity, quality, and revenue.
As with most forms of digital marketing, a great first step to local SEO is to evaluate and optimize your website. This could mean enhancing the content that's already on your website or adding new information to your website on a regular basis via updates or blog posts to keep your website fresh and contextually relevant.
Anytime your business launches a new product, service, or update, this information should be reflected on your website as soon as possible. Not only does this keep your customers abreast of your business's latest and greatest offerings, but it also shows search engines that your website is current and active. Search engines take a lot of factors into consideration when determining when and where to display your business's information to consumers, and a website that's being updated or added to on a regular basis is one of the many ways you can show search engines that your website is deserving of being front and center.
No customer wants to visit a website with stale or outdated information on it. Knowing this, search engines do their best to provide users with website links that are thorough, relevant, and up-to-date. Therefore, it's a great idea to visit your website's back-end and at least once a month and make sure all of the information is as current as possible. Additionally, adding a blog to your website is one of the best ways to accomplish this goal because it simultaneously updates and refreshes your website while adding relevant content to it. If this additional content is also relevant from a local perspective, it will be that much more valuable to the potential customers in your service area.
If your website isn't receiving a weekly update or publishing a weekly blog post, now would be a really good time to consider doing this for your website and following that up with visiting your website's weekly or monthly traffic figures on a regular basis moving forward to see if your updates are resulting in an increase to your website's visitor count.
This is just one way to enhance your business's local SEO efforts. Because local SEO has a lot of moving parts, there are a lot of other elements of search engine optimization you should be paying attention to if you want to maximize your website's ability to bring in new customers. Another example of how you can accomplish this is by creating and monitoring your business's directory listings.
Directory listings are your business's presence on websites like Yelp or even map sites and applications that customers use to get directions to businesses, if your business happens to have a physical location.
Firstly, it's important to have as many of these types of directory listings as possible because different users rely on different websites or apps for this type of information, so you want to cover as many of these bases as possible to improve your likelihood of being found when someone is looking for a particular product or service.
Another crucial element of directory listings which has a significant impact on local SEO is how well these various directory listings match one another. From phone numbers and e-mail addresses to website URL's and other pertinent pieces of data, search engines like to see that these tidbits of information about your business match across this multitude of websites.
If the information is missing or outdated, this is yet another indicator to search engines that either your business isn't active enough or isn't doing good enough of a job of making sure it's providing customers with valid, current information. In turn, the search engine will ding your website, or more specifically, its local SEO prominence.
Conversely, if a search engine detects that your business has many directory listings on the web and all of the pertinent details seem to be current and matching, it will reward your listings or site links with a boost to thank you for doing a good job of keeping this information up-to-date and providing search engine users with valid, factual information.
Because the process of generating these directory listings and maintaining them can be quite cumbersome and time consuming, it often falls to the wayside. Naturally, leveraging services like ours to offload this task and other tasks like it to another party can do wonders for a business, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business while we tend to your local SEO optimization efforts.
Combining an overhaul of your website with an overhaul of your business's presence on the web via directories and other third-party websites can have a huge impact on the amount and type of traffic your website receives, and as you may have guessed, ultimately, this will have a significant impact and the number of products and services your business sells.
And we've only just begun to scratch the surface here. These are just two avenues in the dozens of roads that a business small or large can take to enhance their digital marketing efforts. We realize that the overwhelming majority of businesses simply don't have the time and resources to dedicate to the enhancement and ongoing monitoring of their local search engine optimization.
For this reason, we offer local SEO services as well as many other forms of digital marketing services that can help take this aspect of growing your business off of your plate and into the hands of knowledgeable, experienced professionals.
All we need to do on our end is have a brief conversation with you, followed up by a complementary evaluation of the current state of your website and local SEO efforts. Once this has been completed, we're able to assess where your business currently stands as far as its search engine marketing efforts are concerned and just how much additional work or effort is needed to bring it up to par.
And since every business is unique, so is every digital marketing solution, but because our consultations and evaluations are free of charge, you have nothing to lose by chatting with us and receiving a free quote for our services.
While subscribed to our SEO services, each month, you'll receive a telephone call to let you know how your local SEO efforts are improving as well as traffic reports to show you how your website's traffic is improving. All you have to do on your end is give us a call or send us an e-mail letting us know you'd like our assistance with enhancing your business's local SEO efforts, and we'll do our best to help. Contact us today to learn more and help your business shine online.
Cheers,
-AS