Top SEO Tips For Local Businesses

By now, most businesses and site owners have realized the power of SEO when it comes to driving traffic. By using Search Engine Optimization smartly, you can increase the visibility of your site on Google and thereby ensure that more people find your site when they’re looking for information, entertainment or services. But where SEO is useful for all businesses and sites, it is actually even more useful when it comes to local businesses.

For local businesses, SEO gives you the power to target a much more specific target audience and to thereby reduce the amount of competition you face. At the same time, the traffic you do get is going to be much more targeted, likely leading to better conversions.

Find out more about what makes local SEO so powerful and how to do it right for your business.

The Right Keywords

Whenever you use SEO, you need to first choose the specific keywords or phrases that you want to target. These keywords should be designed to bring the most targeted traffic to your site, so that the people who find you are looking for services like yours and likely to be willing to spend money/click ads/sign up to your newsletter.

For a local business, this means including the location as a modifier. In other words, if you sell hats and you’re in Bigville, you would use the keyphrase ‘buy hats Bigville’. This way, the people coming to your site would be in your area and looking to shop locally.

Add Your Business to Google Maps

Sometimes, people will already be out and about when they’re looking for your business. If you’re running a restaurant for instance, then they might be in the area and looking for food in the area and want to find suggestions from their smartphone.

To make sure that your business is listed as a suggestion, you need to add your site to Google Maps. Use this link and you can add your business to Google and make sure you can be found through maps, Google+ and more. This will also help boost your ranking in related searches.

Smart Link Building

When building links, the objective is always to get links from relevant sites. In your case, that means getting links that are from other sites in your area. You can do this by networking with businesses in person, and actually that will give you a big advantage seeing as people you actually speak to are much more likely to want to link to you.

Find businesses in your area that are local just like yours, then ask them if they’d be willing to work with you by suggesting each other’s goods and/or services on your sites. This way you can land a link from a high PR site and significantly boost your SEO. Here’s some more information. Your local newspaper is also a great place to get a good link.

Get Your Customers to Participate

Again, good local SEO means leveraging your social contacts in the real world to build authority in Google. Another great way to do this is by asking your local visitors to post links to your site on their own blogs as well as on social media.