Seven Local SEO Tricks for Small Businesses to Capitalize
Numbers of prospective customers look for the nearest online source, strategic Local SEO helps you to catch that potential. Since Google’s updates Pigeon (2014) and local pack-3 (2015), the local SEO has become more important for any size business but it becomes more important for small businesses with limited budget for online marketing that target local community. Here, I share seven cost effective local SEO tricks to improve your marketing gains for local community.
- Google search results are biased with relevance, prominence and distance. These factors are combined to help us find the best match for your search. Relevance is pertaining to local listing match, prominence measures the importance of your business for the user and the distance metric pertains to location in search used. Google My Business and Google Maps are free services to get your business listed.
- You should optimize your business information online and in local directories. Your domain name should reflect the niche of your business and location. Page titles enriched with relevant keywords should identify your business. Business name, address, contact number and email address should exist on each page of your business website.
- You must have well- planned and secured link strategy with time framed execution plan. Sharing the business links through social media channels is good practice but the posts should be of quality to do justice with ORM, SEO and SMO plans. Announcements for event organization, discounts for local community, engagement with local chamber of commerce, getting insights from influencers are few safe and result oriented link building tricks.
- You should encourage the online visitors to comment about your products and services; longer stay is the key. Customer-centric layout with media enriched web text is a good web design that you must have to succeed in 2016 with longer users stay.
- Non- stop engagement and communication through blogging solidify your business image and support your search results ranking also. Here, I suggest Joomla + WordPress for effective blogging.
- You should not take the social media sharing as a part time business; you need to be consistent in informing your target community. Scheduled postings keep the audience intact for strong relationship. You should not use social media platforms as the space for link creation; follow the natural route.
- You must have special strategy to make your presence at local media. Press releases, advertisements, banners, guest blogging, inviting freelancers to write about you are tricks to influence local SEO results.