Local SEO Marketing – Is Your Business Listing in the Right Niche?
Local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is vital because it helps small businesses show up frequently in relevant local search results. A recent study released by Bright Local revealed that 89% of internet users search for local information on Google. Local SEO gives customers what they need, when they need it. Here are five proven strategies for success with your business’s local SEO marketing campaign.
Understand your audience: Before you start to plan your local SEO marketing strategy, understand who you want to target. Many times businesses use demographic tools to understand the makeup of their communities and target accordingly. If you have a product or service that only benefits a certain group of people, or an area, pinpointing this group is key to effective local seo marketing. If you don’t want to deal with untargeted customers, outsource your local SEO marketing.
Work with social media outlets: One of the most effective strategies for achieving local SEO marketing is to work with social media sites to build brand recognition and increase website traffic. Social media allow you to engage your target audience in a more personal way. You can also use these platforms to reach out to past customers and remind them to return to your website. As social media engagement evolves and more businesses realize its importance, these websites will likely become even more important for your online marketing campaigns.
Use search engines: Content is still king, but you also want to ensure that your content is optimally-designed for the search engines. This includes using local seo citations to improve your rankings in search engines. Citations are one of the best ways to achieve organic search engine optimization. With search engines continually changing their algorithms, you need to stay on top of what’s happening in order to ensure your business’s rankings remain high.
Focus on local seo marketing: There are two ways to rank well for local search terms. The first is through pay-per-click search engine marketing (SEM). SEM includes bidding on keywords that are relevant to your business location. The second way to rank highly for local seo keywords is to focus on your local customers. Your customers are a great source of backlinks that contribute to your overall SEO ranking factors.
Optimize your site for local search: In addition to working with search engines, many local seo experts recommend small things that business owners can do to optimize their websites for local search. One way to optimize your site for local seo marketing is to update your content regularly. Adding new pages and articles, video and audio files, social media shares, bookmarking, and optimizing your website will help you get found by more local searchers. You also want to make sure you’re optimizing your website to the best keywords that are related to your business. If you find yourself getting a lot of traffic for a term but not many people click on the link, you need to make changes to your site to make it more appealing to the right people.
Make sure your contact details are properly set up on all of your pages: In order to get the most benefit from your business listing, you must have your contact details set up where local searchers can find you. Having your contact details available in as many places as possible, especially on your main landing page, will make it easy for people to contact you and keep you informed about their interest in your products or services. If you don’t have contact details available, your search engine ranking will suffer because people will have to go elsewhere in order to contact you.
Focus on improving your local seo marketing strategies consistently: Even if you think you’re doing well with one strategy, sometimes it’s worth changing the strategy slightly in order to keep getting better results. Some search engines, particularly Google, change their algorithms regularly which makes it difficult to maintain a consistent rank. For example, Google recently introduced two new rankings systems which are changing the way some local searches are scored. While both of these moves will have an effect on your position, you should continue to monitor your position and make any adjustments as necessary. The sooner you start monitoring your position, the sooner you can catch errors and move on to other strategies.