As a small business that dream about conquering the local market, then local SEO is the right strategy. The importance of local SEO for small businesses is undoubtedly vital.
With local SEO, a small business can reach a potential customer that really motivated to purchase something. Thus, you cannot let them go astray and found your competitors instead. Below are the comprehensive guide and tips on doing local SEO for small businesses.
What Is Local SEO for Small Businesses?
Local SEO is an effort of search engine optimization with the main purpose to win the local search. It can be in the form of getting a local pack, ranking high in the local keyword, or dominating the local search.
With the Google algorithm keep evolving, local search is now getting more relevant than ever. Google wants to serve the best result for local search, thus the potential of small businesses appearing on the SERP also getting higher.
How Does Local SEO Help Small Businesses Grow?
Now, let's find out the answer to how local SEO for small businesses can boost online growth. Online search is taken as the starting point of users' purchases. Most of the time, users use the internet before they decided where to buy, visit, or contact their queries.
Their search is typically local search since they want the nearest and relevant business from their location. That is why you need to be visible in their SERP. The only way to make your website visible in the search results is by applying local SEO for small businesses.
Once Google or any other search engine finds your site relevant to the user’s local search, they will consider putting your site at the top of search results. We can say that SEO is not a choice but it is a requirement.
Tips on Local SEO for Small Businesses
After you understand the importance of local SEO for small businesses, now here are the top tips for applying it.
Complete Google Business Profile
First top tip is to optimize and complete your Google Business Profile. This tool is an ideal tool to help you get recognized by Google. The optimization is not only fulfilling all information about your business but also getting Google Map Pack to enhance your site's appearance.
This strategy also includes generating good reviews and keeping the communication alive between you and the customer through Google Reviews. Not to mention, you have to stay updated about the information of your business.
Make sure you have the most current information such as location, working hours, contact information, and so on. Make the user easy to find accurate information about your business and led them to visit, purchase, or book your business.
Figure 1: Map pack example
Conduct Local Keyword Research
If you have built a good Google Business Profile, you can enhance your site by having a number of keywords. To catch more user queries, you need to target relevant keywords and ideas related to your niche.
Conducting local keyword research is part of local SEO for small businesses. To do that, you might need an SEO tool that let you conduct research based on the target market you set.
You can use Sequence Stats to do it. If you have the account already, go to the dashboard and choose the Keyword Ideas menu.
There you can do local keyword research by setting up the target market. The tool is able to display up to 1000 keyword ideas based on the keyword you submit.
Figure 2: Keyword Ideas page in Sequence Stats
Create High-quality Content
Now, you have local keywords in hand then you need to apply them to your content. You need to create high-quality content to reach more local users. You can activate multiple channels to publish the content.
For example, to capture more internet users you can publish blog posts, while to capture social media attention you can publish insightful content on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Medium. You can activate all of them or part of it to start local SEO.
Then, if you have had content published, you can do neat link-building from one channel to another channel. For example, you can attach a website link to your social media account or vice versa.
If you intend to use the blog as your channel, you can put your content in order. Make sure you cover the local topic to attract more local users. Next, you will connect the local content to your product page.
To make sure the content is relevant and SEO friendly, you have to optimize the on-page SEO. If your small business does not have the sources to do on-page SEO, you can contact an SEO professional to do it for you.
Monitor Local Keyword Performance
After you have new content pages, you need to monitor the keyword performance to enhance your local SEO for small businesses. You can monitor the performance of each local keyword you target through Sequence Stats.
Sequence Stats is one for all SEO tool which can be used by all stakeholders, even small businesses. To track the local keyword performance, go to the Sequence Stats Rank Dashboard. It shows the daily data ranking from the keywords you submit to the system.
Figure 3: Keyword Rank Data on Sequence Stats.
Tracking your valuable local keywords is beneficial to understand your brand position. The daily ranking data that is served with understandable visualization will help you understand the performance of your keywords. Thus you can plan page optimization to boost the ranking.
Use Schema Markup
Besides researching and monitoring your local keyword, using schema markup helps your business to pop up and more appealing. Schema markup is a code added to the website's HTML. This code allows the search engine to understand the type of content and display it in a relevant form.
Using schema markup is part of local SEO for small businesses. From schema markup, your site will potentially get rich snippets such as listings, tutorials, events, products, or other rich snippets.
Here is an example of rich snippets:
Figure 4: rich snippets example on SERP
The more attractive rich snippets you get, the more relevant your website to users’ queries. Thus, Google will likely recommend you to the relevant local search results.
That’s everything, the practical tips on local SEO for small businesses. Local business is really recommended to apply local SEO since it will help your business grow and dominate the market. As a small business with a limited budget for SEO, you can use the Sequence Stats SEO tool to support your SEO marketing activities.
Sequence Stats adopts a pay-as-you-go payment scheme that let you pay based on your usage. Thus, you can allocate your budget to production activities and let our SEO tool do the rest. Register yourself to Sequence Stats to experience complete SEO features in one tool.