Leveraging your local SEO equals dominating your local market. This can’t be stressed enough. Optimizing your online business platform (website) is essential for competing with your local business rivals and boosting sales. Local SEO services, like other SEOs, are an equally important part of your business strategy that shouldn’t be missed out at all.
SEO helps optimize your website globally, for everyone on the worldwide web. If you want to capture customers locally, then local SEO is the answer. A local type of SEO is a way more productive way to show your presence and capture potential clients in the geographical area of your local business.
So you’re here to discover what Local SEO best practices work for 2019 – and are you here to stay valid in 2020?
To dominate your local market, these 10 leading strategies should be applied to your marketing plan:
Leverage Local Listings on Directories:
A great way to market your local business is to get your business listed in both popular and the unknown online directories. These directories provide a small blurb about your business, business contact information and reviews about your business.
Our goal here is to maintain and sustain an online presence. Just make sure that you get listed on as many directories as you can – as there are hundreds of directories out there.
Online business directories boost your business’s visibility over other competitors. It increases the chances of customers finding you before they find your competitors. You can do this all by yourself, or by hiring a SEO company to manage your presence across all directories.
Popular examples of directories include Yelp, Google+ and White Pages – to name a few.
Thorough Consistency is a Lifeline:
Keeping all the information about your business consistent across all the directories you list your business on, is essential for your branding.
You should enter complete information in your contact info, such as your name, address and phone number. Secondly, the logo you use on one directory should not be different from the one on another directory.
Otherwise, the customers get confused and it ultimately costs you sales. So consistency of information is key to your branding – across all directories.
Opt In For Google My Business listing:
Google’s search engine provides immense reach for online visibility both globally and locally. That being said, getting listed on Google My Business is a powerful way to generate more leads.
Once you get listed, Google displays your business on Google Maps and shows you in search results via its local database. Moreover, if Google deems your business as legitimate, it’ll then automatically show your business in the sidebar of search pages.
But you also need to pay attention to details about completely filling the Google My Business profile as the tiniest of details can help you be found easily in a local search.
Now that you’re leveraging GMB, why not align your local SEO efforts with social media? Share your GMB page on social media and create posts of regular events, offers and news with people.
Improve Website For Mobile Optimization:
This aspect’s importance cannot be emphasized enough when we look at the staggeringly changing statistical trends about access of websites via cellular devices.
As reported by Statistic: The number of mobile phone users (as expected) will reach a figure of 4.68 billion by the end of 2019. From this, it can be said that if there live 7.5 humans on earth – roughly …then only 3 of them won’t use a cell phone.
In 2018 alone, 52% of all website traffic came from mobile devices in 2018. It is hence recommended that you hire fully professional web development services in your local area.
30% of website visitors click away from a web page if it takes more than 6 to 10 seconds of loading time.
Over the past few years, Google has shifted its policy towards giving more access and visibility to websites that are relatively better at providing a faster browsing experience via mobile phone. This makes sense if we analyze the mentioned shift in cell-phone usage trends.
Grab Quality Traffic via Backlinks:
You’ve got to have backlinks to get boosted by traffic of potential leads. Just don’t miss this tool. A backlink is a link that’s posted on a website – clicking on which shall take the reader to your website.
To have 100% organic backlinks, you’ll need to crank out quality content that brings readers value. Eventually when more and more people shall share your content – you’ll (your business in essence) get noticed.
Now that you wield some reputation due to the readership power of your quality driven content – it’s time that you approach authoritative websites or the businesses and organizations you’d been partnering with for a while. Just ask them to include a link that tracks to your website.
And if you can’t do that, the quality of your shared content will make it more likely to be referenced by others in their content.
Business Reviews:
Visitors are influenced a lot while they read existing customer’s reviews about your products and services. In fact, they read reviews – on purpose – to see how other customers feel about your business and whether they should be purchasing from you.
Good reviews on your Google my business page and on your website build a good reputation – and you need it! So apart from optimizing your GMB page, positive reviews enhance sales as well. According to a 2017 report named local consumer review survey by Bright Local’s …it was revealed that 85% of customers believe online reviews are as much as personal recommendations.
So what you can do is ask your clients (after closing a sale) in person to leave good reviews. You must also send emails to existing customers and ask them nicely – to share their thoughts and feelings in the reviews section. Thank them as a response afterwards in a polite and professional way.
This local SEO strategy ultimately encourages local customers to purchase from you – more and more.
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