How do I use SEO to increase ranking of my small business site on a shoestring budget?

No need to say that the general (otherwise, organic) Search Engine Optimization often seems definitely overwhelming for too many online startups and locally-targeted projects of just minor scale. But when it comes to employing local SEO to increase ranking within a given city/town or targeted region, this much narrower aspect of Google’s search can actually become not that complicated. Fear not! As below I’m going to show you three fully actionable strategies that will help you get everything in place to that point. So, let’s delve.

How to Use Google’s SEO to Increase Ranking Locally

Before everything else, let’s face it – given that you want to run a benefitting local optimization strategy on a tight (or even zero) marketing budget, all you need is to invest your own time & effort over there. So, instead of spending mammoth amounts of cash, you will have to make most out of your creativity and hyper-focused tactics in local SEO to increase your ranking at the level of locales the right way. That’ being said, let’s quickly run through the following: Long-Tail Keyword Focus, High-Quality Guest Blogging, as well as Local Search Optimization itself, and PageSpeed Considerations. 

Long-Tail Keyword Focus

Remember, your potential clients/buyers are tending to receive the best-matching answer to their most frequent questions and the commonest “pain points” related to your business or revolving around a certain product/service you’re dealing with. That’s why among the other core aspects of local SEO that can increase your ranking on a limited budget, focusing more on the right usage of long-tail search terms will help you provide the best deal without wasting their time. I mean that unlike standard single keywords, their long-tail variations can offer you the following major benefits, such as:

• Specific focus on the primary user intent behind the search with your website content creation, and occasional publications of locally relevant articles/posts.
• A measurably lower keyword competition, that allows you to successfully compete with the lion’s share of well-established companies and even industry giants serving the same city/town or region.
• Potentially higher conversion-generating potential, due to a much higher specificity of precisely-targeted search terms, which often deliver a lot of quality traffic and strong lead generation – directly from online search.

High-Quality Guest Blogging

Another powerful way of improving your local SEO strategy is investing your time in creating original articles/posts, which stay closely on topic – and getting a valuable locally-relevant link in return. Of course, there has been a lot of related discussions, but I personally believe that guest blogging is still a valuable tool in every website’s local optimization arsenal. In other words, as long as you’re creating a spam-free content of high quality to be posted on third-party local websites/blogs relevant to your product/service or business industry – guest blogging remains a sure-fire way of making most out of local SEO to increase your ranking without paying, at least directly. Once again, all you need is to be willing and ready to pay for that with your own time & effort – and you will instantly get another good opportunity to build broader public awareness, in lime with proving your own authority and expertise in the industry you’re targeting with your business. That way, I also recommend targeting local blogs with a brand-new audience, developing yourself as a strong thought leader, and joining closely related conversations, which involve top industry influencers and the most popular blog writers well-known within your target locale. That’s it.

Local Search Optimization

To gain the highest ROI and the most speedy online promotion in local search, consider the following actionable steps and simple suggestions:

• Avoid choosing too competitive keywords (of course, if you don’t have some extra cash to be spent for supporting your organic efforts with, say, PPC ads).
• Complete your Google My Business listing and fill in all local SEO accounts, which are locally relevant to your business.
• Don’t forget to manage your business via a personal profile on Google Plus, in line with submitting Google Maps on every service/category and landing page of key importance.
• To make yourself more trustworthy among potential audience you’re targeting, get your NAP data and the whole site submitted/listed on top local directories, closely related business listings, as well as big data aggregators within your niche – and you’re done.
• Try to put the name of the city/town or region served with your business – in every webpage's Title Tag (of course, when applicable).
• Make sure your NAP data is correct, always accurate and consistent throughout every listing/directory/data aggregator you’re involving. Otherwise, that may call for potential issues with local relevancy/correct indexing in the eyes of Google search engine itself.
• Pay strong attention to getting natural reviews, in line with maintaining their net positive SEO value by maintaining a healthy conversation with your target audience.

Maximize PageSpeed with Minimum Cash & Labor

Elevating your page loading speed is another good way to boost your SEO and increase ranking of your small business website. The thing is that now providing a sufficiently fast PageSpeed has already become a MUST for every business site (and particularly those targeted at mobile search within a certain city/town or region) – simply because people want to get nearly immediate responses when searching locally, and also from the viewpoint of the major search engines as well (i.e., your page speed is at some point a fully measurable and independent ranking factor considered by Google too). 

Understanding the importance of this actually inseparable part of good user experience, here is what can be quickly done to that point:

• First of all, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights free online tool to quickly test your web pages.
• Next, work well on your on-page images to have them well-optimized and compressed.
• You can try to reduce your average server response time.
• Also, make sure to leverage browser caching, in line with minifying CSS/HTML/JavaScript.
• At last, eliminate landing page redirects, and render-blocking JavaScript/CSS in your above-the-fold content (should it happen that you have one of these).