Simple SEO Strategies to Improve Your Local Presence

Let’s be honest. You started your business in order to make more money. Sure, we all like to tell ourselves that we’re in it to make our customers happy, but at the end of the day, it’s not a coincidence that happy customers equate to more money for your business.

As a local business, you probably have your regulars, and you probably have a great relationship with them. What your business needs to grow, however, is to break the limits of that reality — to be more visible and gain new customers.

Local SEO will get you there. These strategies will help you make your online presence stronger in local search.

Use social content

Approximately 58% of business owners view social media as an important platform for their business. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social networks and apps have a positive effect on your website’s popularity because they are avenues where you can engage with your customers directly.

While you’re improving your SEO tactics, don’t forget to leverage the strength of your social presence by being active your business pages. Find out where your target audience hangs out and start there. It might be Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Once you get the hang of it, you can start branching out to more networks to reach more customers. The important thing is that you get started right away, cause you’re missing out.

Optimize for mobile

Local searches are dominated by mobile users. Yet, since the arrival of Mobilegeddon in 2015 (Google’s mobile algorithm update), there are still websites out there that are not mobile friendly. Now with the Possum Google algorithm roll-out, Google has proven once again how important mobile is, as the algo adjusts searches according to location and distance to and from results.

It’s never too late to make your website mobile friendly. WPtouch is a great WordPress plugin that does the work for you. Here’s a video on how to install this plugin:

Check your business listing information for accuracy

Google My Business and all the important online listings should give accurate information about your business. Conflicting information will get in the way of local search strategies, and this may further result in user confusion, which directly affects your conversion rate.

When you’re submitting your profiles to business listings, always double-check the information. Google My Business allows you to edit your business information. The edits you made will be subject to review — some edits may be pending for review, accepted, or rejected.

Improve your keyword research

Google has long adjusted to users’ preference for long-tail variations of keywords in queries. Contextual relationships are a huge part of the mix. When you do your keyword research, don’t forget to include the long-tail variations of the keywords you would like to rank for. You don’t have to include every possible combination, though; let the search engine’s capacity for LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) take care of identifying those.

A great tool we use for keyword research is KWFinder. It helps you identify those long tail keywords that will bring the most value to your site. LSI Graph will identify LSI keywords you can work into your content to keep it topically relevant.

Improve your customer service

Customer service is not a technical aspect of SEO, but its effects are a powerful currency for online strategies. This is because good customer service increases your chances of getting a review on your website — not just a review, but a positive testimonial. And Google has always shown a preference for customer reviews as a powerful factor in boosting a brand’s online presence. Good customer service leads to good reviews and recommendations online. Do your work well, and your customers themselves will market for you.

Local SEO is one of the most important marketing strategies for any business that wants to get as close as possible to their customers. By building your local search presence, you’re opening more opportunities that will drive more customers to your business.