Can anybody help me with developing an efficient SEO plan for small local startup business?

I can share some pretty useful tips & tricks that will hopefully help you with developing an efficient SEO plan to promote your brand-new small business website, which has recently gone live. Of course, getting a deep-delve into the world of organic Search Engine Optimization can be a really scary thing, particularly for recently launched ventures of just minor scale – mainly due to a cutthroat-level search competition ruling over there. Note, however, that developing an accomplished SEO plan with a precise local targeting isn’t actually that overwhelming as you may think. Although you will inevitably have to compete with lots of already well-established big guys, squeezing the whole local search optimization strategy on a usually tight (or even zero) marketing budget can still become a fully doable task for you to keep up with (of course, when done right). All that being said, let’s quickly run through the following main aspects related to developing an initial SEO plan for local startup projects, such as dominating regional search with Basic Local SEO Tactics, in line with betting more on Hyper-Localized Long-Tail Keywords, as well as investing minimum time & effort in Providing a Sufficient PageSpeed. That’s it.

3 Actionable Steps to Developing an SEO Plan for Small Local Startups

Basic Local SEO Tactics

Focusing precisely on local search optimization, rather than spilling yourself over too challenging nationwide (not to mention global) environment – is arguably the smartest way of developing an initial SEO plan for small businesses, particularly when you’ve gone live with a brand-new site just a short while ago. With this simple idea in mind, here are some basic local SEO tactics to help you set the right focus from the very beginning:

• Registering your company, setting up your personal business account, and submitting your general NAP data with Google My Business (GMB) dashboard would be your best starting point that MUST be completed first and foremost.
• Make sure you’re picking the right primary, as well as secondary business categories when filling in your GMB listing. And double-check your NAP data to have everything as accurate and consistent as possible.
• Embed your key service/category and landing pages with Google’s location Maps – that’s needed not only to guide your potential visitors, but to make things easier for the major search engines (namely when it comes to evaluating your physical location proximity to the current searcher’s location).
• Try to put some hyper-localized search terms (i.e., those containing the name of the city, town, or region served with your business) into every Title Tag (of course, when applicable), so that you will get higher chances of being displayed among the first organic search results in Google’s local listings.
• Don’t skimp your time & effort in maintaining a net positive value of your Google reviews. Remember, getting reviews naturally and keeping a positive conversation with the interested users will not only make you look trustworthy for the whole potential audience you’re targeting. The thing is that Google itself is at some point considering user reviews as independent positive ranking signals.

Hyper-Localized Long-Tail Keywords

Optimizing your body content (otherwise, web copy), as well as the key elements of on-page SEO (i.e., Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, Link Text Anchors, Image ALT Tags, Headers/Subheaders, etc.) should be your next stage on the way to developing an efficient SEO plan that will give you maximum exposure to local search. Given that you don’t want to spend any additional marketing budget over there, I strongly recommend you to run another in-depth keyword research. That would be needed to grab some extra valuable long-tail keyword suggestions for creating hyper-localized content types throughout your website. And no need to say that in terms of a really sharp keyword competition commonly driving the whole local search (actually disregarding a particular region or a given business industry you’re dealing with), focusing mainly on long-tail keyword expressions will be your sure-fire approach to quickly plug into nearly any target niche, no matter how narrow or competitive it is. That way, make sure you recognize the following major benefits of hyper-localized long-tail keywords:

• Instantly better chances of making your site noticed in the top results among the other well-established players.
• When compared with the standard “short-tail” keywords, their long-tail expressions are almost always much easier to rank for.
• Hyper-localized keyword variations will be commonly better-targeted and sometimes even more relevant than their core (otherwise, “seed”) keywords relevant to your product/service or a given industry area.
• Potentially greater flow of organic search traffic, and therefore a measurably higher rate of reasonably expected conversions generated over time.

Providing a Sufficient PageSpeed

Meeting this basic requirement to a sufficiently fast page loading speed should be completely out of the question – simply because longer load times already have a proven negative effect on conversions. Moreover, Google itself seems to rely on this online performance factor as an independent ranking signal at some point. That’s why for developing an initial SEO plan that will serve you well from the very beginning, I recommend considering at least the following set of standard actions to be taken right away:

• You should employ a well-informed strategic approach – make sure to clearly understand exactly what needs a quick-fix, and which elements are already fine for the moment.
• Start with running a spot-check using PageSpeed Insights, also known as Google’s open-source online tool, which is available to every webmaster/site owner by default.

• Among the other frequently arising issues related to the average load time, the following are recommended for basic consideration before anything else: Image Compression/Optimization (to be enabled), Server Response Time (to be reduced, when applicable), Landing Page Redirects (to be avoided), JavaScript/CSS/HTML (to be minified, if possible), Browser Caching (to be maximum-leveraged), as well as render-blocking JavaScript and above-the-fold content-related CSS (to be eliminated, both).