How to get more visibility for my small business with local SEO strategy?

If you are looking for a quick way of getting prominent online exposure for your small business using local SEO – you’re in the right place. As below I’m going to outline the basic techniques of the Search Engine Optimization at the level of locales. So, for every online entrepreneur who’s still not quite sure how to drive small business with local SEO strategy – here are several simple yet incredibly effective optimization tactics. They can really give an edge, of course, when done right. That being said, let’s delve.

Hot to Improve Online Performance of Your Small Business with Local SEO

Before anything else, let’s face it – unfortunately, the lion’s share of guides and articles on the general concept of the Search Engine Optimization. But the thing is that such SEO tips are most likely to be either time-consuming schemes of optimization, or at least highly nuanced working stuff that requires a lot of know-how knowledge commonly mastered only by expert SEOs with aged experience in the industry. But the following things are fully manageable and doable – all you need is to be willing and ready to invest some time and effort in completing the following.

Tier One: Getting Fundamentals. GoogleMyBusiness Page and Citations

As for GoogleMyBusiness page, here is your main to-do-list. Make sure to full in and keep fresh the following items:

• Working hours – take care to make your working schedule accurate, in line with clearly setting up holiday hours to prevent user disappointment or confusion.
• Photos – make most out of your business personality, showcase your team, place some good candids, interior & exterior shots, etc.
• Reviews – you should provide a prompt response to all reviews, both positive and negative ones.

Once you GMB listing is submitted, it’s time to build citations using the leading data aggregators and directories. Here they are. Top data aggregators: Localeze, Factual, Infogroup, and Acxiom. Recommended directories: Yelp, EzLocal, CitySearch, MapQuest, Yahoo, YellowPages, etc

Tier Two: Focusing on Precise User Engagement in Social Media

Given that Google considers Social Media interaction when determining web page rankings, focusing your efforts over there will definitely pay off. Consider the following simple suggestions:

• Identify the right social channel that would be top relevant to your target audience.
• Survey your customers, manage feedback, and make sure to commit to updating your social content timely.
• Use keywords and hashtags within your Social Media profiles, and particularly in titles.
• Create contests, dedicated rewards programs, post local events, in line with capturing some footage like short video or bright images to tag customers and broaden your outreach.
• Use GeoTag images on platforms that allow geotagging when uploading a photo/video (like Facebook or Instagram). That way, you will have another good opportunity to include the name of your business and its address.

Bottom Line

After all, don’t forget to optimize your small business website for local SEO at the on-page level. Here are the primary areas to be focused:

• Make Page Titles and Meta Tags short & concise, in line with embedding them with hyperlocal keywords (i.e., those mentioning the name of the city/region).
• Work on creating location-specific landing pages. Note, however, that they must always be unique – I don’t recommend using templates.
• Embed your business website’s homepage with Google Maps, and make sure it provides a user-friendly and mobile-responsive navigation.