If you are running a smaller business that operates on a specific area then you must try local SEO. It helps to get more targeted audience from your locality.
According to a statistic 46% of Google queries looking for local information. So, if you can rank your business locally there is a huge chance to boost your revenue over the night.
In this article we will highlight top five strategies to improve your local SEO. You can follow them in tandem to get the best result at earliest.
1. Create GMB Account.
To increase your local visibility, it is must to set up a Google My Business account. Create an account on GMB and verify the ownership. After that provide all the useful information about your business that Google wants like logo, location, opening hour, contact information, website etc.
It also helps in another way. According to statistic of Oberlo 57% of consumer reads Google review. And they do it before making the decision of buying anything. So, if your business gets positive reviews from your first couple of local customers, automatically it will be induced other review readers to grab your product or service.
2. Do keyword research properly.
If you don’t know what your local people are searching for then you will never be able to reach them. In this purpose you can take assistance from Google’s own tool Keyword Planner that is the best for keyword research. It allows you filter keyword research based on your location. And the result of this tool is more reliable than any other keyword research tool available in the market.
Once you get a complete list of local keywords, write informative content around them. Use those keywords in your title, meta description to get more preferences in ranking purpose.
3. List your business in local directories and other reputed business directories.
It helps a lot to increase your website’s visibility in local search. Assume that you have a restaurant in Melbourne and you have listed your business in a local business directory with the complete business details. If someone search a generic quire like “Restaurant in Melbourne”; there is a big chance to rank the business directories restaurant listing page on number one position than any individual site. People can find your business from the listing page. If you didn’t find any good local directory then you should list your business on other reputed directories as well like Yelp, Foursquare, CrunchBase, yellow pages, MapQuest etc.
4. Create content on local stories and trends.
To grab your local audience’s attention always focus on the contents that specks about the locality. This matters a lot because local SEO Brisbane will not be the same as local SEO Sydney. As the search intent will not be the same for both the location. Some tips to create local contents:
- Write topics on local news, stories and gossips.
- Create videos on your product or service and let them know how it will help your local customers.
- Use location specific about us page that includes the complete details of your business and attach the Google Map in each location-based page.
- In a section include your happy local customers testimonials.
5. Take care of the online reviews.
You should take care of your business reviews very carefully. Because review is a vital thing that helps the buyer to make the final decision. It may be GMB, your own product pages review or other sites where people leave their experience of your product or service.
You must need to encourage your buyer to leave their valuable review. Some tips to do that:
- Send a mail after some days of purchasing the product or service and request them to share their experience.
- Pop-up a message that please review the product when a returning buyer will visit your site.
You might get some negative reviews. Few tips to deal with them:
- Reply to the review as soon as possible.
- Appreciate the both positive and negative reviewer.
- Assure them to fix their problem soon or replace the products.
- If you found a fake review. Try to remove those reviews. Every review website has their own procedure for deleting a review.
