The Importance of SEO for a Local Business: Shout Local

In this digital age, an online presence is key to the survival of any business. Besides being able to reach a wider geographical area than you would if you solely depended on your physical location, an online presence will help you increase your brand popularity and customer retention rate. But how do you set yourself up for online visibility to ensure your target customers find you? The answer is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Simply put, search engine optimization involves conducting tweaks on your website to increase its ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs). The higher your search engine ranking is the easier it will be for potential customers to find your business when they search for related terms. By increasing your visibility, you make it easier for customers to find and to trust you over your competitors, increasing your sales and rate of growth.

The lack of a one-fits-all solution to approaching search engine optimization makes it challenging for small business owners. Luckily for these owners and managers, Shout Local offers a checklist that can be used to gauge your efforts. With the FREE  Local SEO Audit , you can generate a search engine report for your business with clear indications of citations that require work. Below are some components enterprises can work on to increase their local Google search authority, making it easier for high intent customers to find them:

1. Links and Website Authority

Domain authority is a measure of how well your website is linked to other reputable sites. The links should also be relevant to your business to increase its authority. Backlinks tell Google that the site linking to your page trusts the information on it, boosting your website ranking. However, you need to be careful about backlinks. Although they have been one of the best strategies for years, some links can hurt your efforts. Ensure that you get backlinks from high-quality, non-spammy websites that have high domain authority.

You also need to be aware of do-follow and no-follow links. Do-follow links tell Google that the website linking to your website trusts your page whereas no-follow links tell Google that they do not trust your page. These links do nothing for your ranking other than sometimes helping generate traffic to your site. At the end of the day, all kind of links and citations help improve your links and website authority.

2. Rank Checker

To properly evaluate your strategy, you need to know where you rank on search engines. It is a task that is sometimes overlooked by local businesses, but one that is crucial to gauging the effectiveness of your strategies. You can also check how you rank against your competitors. By doing this, you can compare your strategies with theirs and learn from them if they are doing better.

One way to check your rank is by typing a given keyword on a search engine and analyzing the results. This way is, however, time-consuming and will not give any specific analytics to explain your ranking. By using a Rank Checker from SHOUT LOCAL, you will have access to important analytics that will help you know why some of your competitors are performing better than you.

3. Local Business Listings

A local business listing is an online directory that lists your business’ name, contacts and address. Businesses with Google my business rankings will be found easily on SERPs. As such, it is specifically tailored to get your business details to people around your business premises. It is a great way to do local advertising around the clock because your details are always present on Google, exposing you to thousands of clients who may be only a walking distance from your business. Many local business listings also include opening and closing hours and images from your premises, making it one of the best ways to do marketing free of charge. Yes, local business listings are free. All you need to do is ensure you do your listing correctly.

Make sure you include all relevant details and contacts carefully so that customers can easily reach your or get in touch. You can also link your other social media pages such as Instagram, Facebook and Pintrest to give even more information about your business. Consistency is another thing you need to be careful with; make sure the name you use for your listing is consistent with the one you use on your website. The primary reason for this branding and creating a feeling of trustworthiness, which are important when a customer is engaging with you for the first time.

4. Reviews & Ratings (Brand Reputation)

The reviews & ratings left by customers about your brand plays a major role in determining your customer trust. Google reviews allow customers to gauge what previous customers think about your services. One of the best ways to improve your search engine ranking ratings is by driving traffic to your business through social channels and creating meaningful engagements. Social channels such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and even Pinterest are all powerful tools because the more traffic you have the bigger your brand name and hence stronger brand reputation.

Powerful brand reputation means that your business and products are more likely to be recommended by loyal customers to new customers, which means that you get many visits to your website. This means that you will need to link your website to your social media platforms to maximize engagement. This in itself will also prompt great Google Reviews for your website because a lot of traffic means you are doing something right.

5. Google My Business

Google My Business is a free tool from Google that allows you to manage your online presence. It allows you to create a profile for your business that includes your address, working hours, categories and reviews. Most businesses that have used Google services, such as Google+ may already have Google my Business listing. Before creating one, you need to confirm whether you have one or not. If you do, you need to claim it, if not you can go ahead and create one. Google my business rankings will help you to appear on Google Search and Google Maps, making it one of the most invaluable local business search engine optimization tools available.

6. On Site SEO

On Site SEO is search engine optimization done directly on the website page to enable the content on the page itself to rank well and gain organic traffic. This method focuses on the quality of the content and page. You can do this in many ways. To begin with, you should ensure you only publish high quality and relevant material that resonates with your intended audience. This also means that you have the challenge of delivering material that conveys trustworthiness, intellectual or professional authority and indisputable logic. You need to be good. This quality content then needs to be keyword-rich, especially within the first 100 words. It should also never fail to include optimized subheadings, meaning that they too have specific keywords.

Subheadings are also a good way to make your content easy to read. It should also include HTML tags for the title, meta and header and relevant images. You could also choose to have links to your social media pages like Twitter and Pintrest.

By taking into considerations the components listed above, businesses will increase their website ranking, increasing their visibility on the results page of search engines. Search engine optimization is complicated, and not all managers will know how to go about it. By making use of Shout Local’s Search Engine Optimization Audit tool, you know where you stand and will receive key pointers on areas you can work on to improve your local business ranking.

So please use our FREE SEO LOCAL SEARCH AUDIT and get in touch on how we can help you get noticed!!