Ways To Build Local Visibility Using SEO
Get found by local customers when they’re ready to buy. Local SEO boosts visibility, engagement, and leads for small businesses.
Ways To Build Local Visibility Using SEO
With an increase in map-based searches, local SEO is presenting an opportunity for small businesses to enhance their visibility on maps and attract local customers.
If people are not finding you, they are not buying from you, so local SEO helps small businesses get discovered by customers in their area at the exact moment they are searching for a product or service. Optimizing company’s online presence for local search intent and engaging with your target audience through social media enables you to expand your visibility and attract more customers. When small businesses appear in local search results, they gain credibility and are more likely to attract local customers, especially when they receive positive reviews.
Some Of The Most Impactful Ways For Building Local Visibility Using SEO.
1. Check For Technical Errors That Could Impact Indexing
Learning the basics about search engine crawling and indexing your website helps you guide your SEO efforts going forward. Optimizing websites for search engines begins with high-quality content and ends with submitting it to be indexed. Whether with an XML Sitemap, Google Search Console URL Submission Tool, Bing Webmaster Tools, or IndexNow, get the content indexed while your webpage begins its journey to the top of search results.
Content, technical SEO, and links are all important to maintaining your site’s performance trajectory. But if your site has indexing issues, the other SEO elements will only get you so far.
2. Create Exceptional Content
Exceptional content means original material created specifically for your brand, based on your knowledge, perspective, and audience needs. It is not copied or reworded from existing articles or generated in bulk using generic templates. There are various types and genres of content being created every day. But to make content worth reading for audience, you need to make sure that it is visible on the Google search engine results page. Nowadays, content with ‘how to’ headlines is working really well, and the traffic on such type of content is higher compared to other pieces of content.
3. Incorporate Local Link Building Into Your SEO Strategy
Links are an important trust signal to search engines such as Google, and it is suggested that others endorse your content.
Incorporating local link-building opportunities into an SEO strategy for a local business with some local aspects helps you gain more variety in your backlinks as well as get exposure with your geo-targeted audience. Various local link-building opportunities you can pursue for your business website and have an increasing chance for local rankings. If you’re not interested in the reputation management benefits of local review sites, then you will be interested in building local links. Most sites will allow you to have a link to your website along with your business listing, but only if you create or claim your listing. When it comes to SEO value, however, you may not be looking at the holy grail of anchor text and dofollow.
4. Get Your Google Business Profile In Order
Google Business Profile is a free tool and suite of interfaces encompassing a dashboard, in-SERP editing, local business profiles, and a volunteer-driven support forum with this branding.
While each local business needs to take a nuanced approach to using Google Business Profile and Google Maps to market itself, most brands will maximize their growth potential on these platforms by following some steps.
No local search strategy is complete without a well-optimized GBP. While Google draws local business information from a wide variety of sites, directories, and networks around the web, it does look to its own profiles as a single source of truth about any local business. Previously known as the Google My Business program, the profiles have grown richer and more interactive.
5. Ensure Local Listings Are Accurate
Businesses with complete, accurate info are likely to show up in local search results, and if your business info is not accurate, your Business Profile might not show up for relevant searches in your area. A complete business profile info enable customers know what you do, where you are, and when they can visit. Information like your full address, your phone number, your kind of business, and other details like parking or Wi-Fi availability.
Google values searcher experience, and inaccurate, outdated information negatively impacts searcher experience, which ultimately affects local visibility. Wherever a searcher encounters your business listing online, whether on social, in a local directory, in Yellow Pages, or on review sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor, the information they find there should enable them to seamlessly convert.
Furthermore, small businesses can use a local SEO tool such as Moz Local or Semrush for automating the process of scanning for business listings and monitoring their accuracy.
6. Monitor & Respond To Local Reviews
As owners' responses represent one of the greatest assets of your local business, it has become an active contributor to online reputation, rather than a powerless bystander. Review is of the ideal five-star or the dreaded one-star variety, classifying consumer sentiment into types and matching that to an appropriate tone of response that would make you adapt to this form of reputation management. Reviews are a highly impactful part of the local search experience and in 2021, 77% of local consumers said they always or regularly read reviews when searching for local businesses.
When local business owners learn that 96% of US adults read local business reviews, it is normal to feel and very helpful to realize that you actually have an extraordinary amount of power to improve reputation, customer retention, and revenue when negative reviews show up on your profiles
