by Dan Brunell, founder of Innovation Infinite
Many people use search engines to find information from the internet these days. According to Hubspot, Google, the dominant search engine player, gets around 5.6 billion searches per day. That huge number of searches makes it essential for our business to rank high in search engines to get traffic from people who search for something related to our business.
This is where local SEO can become important as it can help your business to have more presence in search engines for relevant local queries. However, what are the things that you can do to optimize your local SEO? Here are five tips you can implement immediately for that.
1. Claim Your Google My Business Page.
Google can show search results that consist of Google My Business pages when it answers local search queries related to certain businesses (e.g. café near me, beauty salon New York, etc). If you want your business to be shown by Google in this kind of query too, you better have a Google My Business page.
The registration process should be simple as you only need to fill in the details of your business. By doing this, you can improve your online presence easily and get more potential traffic to your business.
2. Create Quality Content for Local Keywords.
There are probably some keywords you can use to grow your business traffic if you rank high on them. Local keywords such as best marketing agencies in California or New York traditional food might be relevant for your business and have decent search volume too.
If this is the case, then you should create quality content that answers people’s search intent for those queries. The traffic you get from the content should be easier to convert to potential leads for your business offerings. This should help you to grow your business from your SEO effort.
3. Get Positive Online Reviews for Your Business.
Search engines like to give the best answers to their users. When they answer queries related to local businesses, they want to show the best businesses in their search results. One of the easiest indicators of the business quality is the online reviews it has.
Thus, if you want to be more prominent in search results, you should try to gather positive reviews for your online business pages. For this, you may want to ask your customers for online feedback after they try your products/services. This should help you get more positive reviews if they are satisfied with what your business offers.
4. Acquire Backlinks from Local Websites.
Backlinks are still one of the most important ranking factors for Google. Thus, your business needs to get backlinks to its website if it wants more presence in search engines. It will be better too if you can get those backlinks from prominent local websites.
This kind of backlinks should be more relevant and, thus, might help you rank better for local search queries related to your business. Besides, you might be able to get better leads if those local website visitors visit your website as well through those links.
5. Have a Website Page for Each of Your Offerings and Categories.
There are many kinds of keywords that search engines process every day. Some of those keywords might be best answered by your business offerings or their categories. Therefore, to be ready for them, you should have pages related to your offerings and their categories on your website.
Those pages should be easy to make as they only contain the details of your business offerings. By having these pages in place, you should be able to answer many more search queries. As a result, you can get more traffic and leads for your business.
Local SEO can be significantly helpful in your effort to get more potential customers from the internet. By implementing the five tips above, you should be able to optimize your local SEO more to give benefits to the growth of your business.
Dan Brunell is a person who has a passion for technology and SEO. He is the founder of Innovation Infinite, a website that discusses all things about technology.