General SEO is great for generating more awareness for your brand and your business online. It does this by making sure you appear at the top of search results whenever someone searches for a topic or keyword related to your business. As you optimize your content, remember that your content should be optimized for users first and nothing unnatural should be done to rank locally.
Local businesses can improve traffic on their websites and through their doors by optimizing for features called “local pack” or “3-pack” search results. These are the block of three business listings that appear below the map when someone does a local search. For example, if you sell kitchen appliances, offer design services, and have a physical location that serves a large area, you’ll want to show up in both organic and local searches. They both provide value to your business and work together to draw in potential customers. As a local business, you have the opportunity the appear within both the main organic search results and the local map pack at the same time. Local SEO always includes research into the keywords that potential customers use to find what you have to offer.
Creating local content can help maximize your content marketing efforts to produce more high-quality leads. When you’re using keywords as a part of your local SEO solutions, you must be using the keywords that people are actually using when they perform searches. Did you know that over one-third of small businesses still don’t have a website at all?
Adria will help you cut through the noise and share actionable secrets that big brands use to succeed with social media. Cori takes you through how to tackle them at large scale, keep up, and not get burn out. This desktop program crawls websites’ links, images, CSS, script, and apps from an SEO perspective. Screaming Frog will analyze up to 500 URLs for free and unlimited URL analysis in its paid version. Be the local authority for your industry by promoting local industry gatherings, news, employees, and other educational content on your blog. Think of top-of-the-funnel content that goes beyond what your business sells.
When someone rates or reviews your store online, it will have an impact on your ranking potential. Positive ratings and reviews signal to search engines that your business is valuable to searchers. In today’s digital marketplace it is becoming more and more common to see consumers searching for local businesses to meet their needs.
When this occurs, it also decreases your website’s bounce rate and increases site visitor time on-site, which both contribute to SEO. In Content Marketing , internal links increase the authority of pages receiving links, so it’s common for businesses to blog to build authority for product or service landing pages, for example. Local citation management is important for SEO, but it’s also crucial because inaccurate NAP’s can send potential customers to the wrong location or website. BrightLocal makes it easy for you to constantly manage local citations across the internet for less than $30 a month.
There was a time when ignoring a business’s reviews was often thought to be the best advice, but brand engagement matters today, and Google rewards it. These include purchasing, getting to a business’s website, getting information, browsing, and comparing products. When your customers go about their day and realize they need to make a purchase, they will likely perform that search on their mobile devices. This goes back to creating a site with a strong user experience. For another thing, try to create rich content for your website that they can’t get just on the results page.
Similar to the local pack results, organic results are also surfaced based on the search query used. But these results typically show up below the 3-pack results. Unlike local pack results, these listings don’t include detailed information about your business, like contact details, hours, and star reviews. As I mentioned above, building local backlinks, creating local content, listing your business in local directories, and more will all help you appear in local search results. Elizabeth Kraus is passionate about providing the best answers for small business marketing to FSB readers. If that person has a good experience with your business and leaves a positive review, your business is more likely to rise in the rankings again.
The Map Pack (synonymous with “Local Pack”) consists of a short list of local business listings placed at or very near the top of a search results page. These customers are looking for businesses with specific attributes, such as location or time-sensitive services like a meal or an oil change, and this is reflected in their search intent. Google’s algorithm works to pair the customer with a business or choice of businesses that meets their unique needs. These challenges make it extremely important to work with an experienced company that can provide the SEO campaign needed to increase your company’s online visibility. Helium SEO will work with you to make sure that your company has an optimal Local SEO strategy that will target and convert leads into actual customers.