We all know that launching a business online can be intimidating to any small business owner. Any business can benefit from search engine optimization; making a small investment goes a long way. Thus, local SEO should be a self-evident choice for promoting and marketing your business on the web.
What is local SEO?
Local SEO aims to get your business name and website in front of people physically located near it. The search engines are modern-day yellow pages, and all your potential customers are also looking to find where all your products and services are located.
Following are ways to popularize your business through SEO-
1. Submit your website to search engines
When launching a website, the first thing you need to do is to submit the site to the search engines. Before marketing your website through various online channels, ensure that your Metadata is accurate and follows the Google Webmaster guidelines. The on-site optimizations site includes page titles and Meta descriptions. The page titles should also include your business name and one or two keywords that you want the web visitors to find you with. You should avoid using many keywords and make the titles and descriptions appear natural.
2. Implement Google Analytics
All the web host providers often try to bundle analytics and data packages. The best free analytics tool is Google Analytics, and it takes less than two minutes to sign up and implement the code. You can also start collecting web traffic data, and this data includes the number of web visitors and how long they browse your site, where the visitors are located and how they arrived at your website.
3. Add your business to Google+ local
It is crucial to add your business to Google+ local, and more people search for businesses online than anywhere else. You can also add your website and business information to the Google local business directory and it is free and straightforward. You can also manage your listing information, including the business description and service details.
4. Keyword research
Keyword research is critical and helps you determine what keywords or topics you should target. It is a fact that a page will never rank for a single keyword, and this is why we mention the topics. Most web pages rank for hundreds or thousands of keyword variations; you should keep this in mind when doing keyword research. The best type of keywords, check the following boxes-
Search volume
If no one searches for your keywords, even the most outstanding content won’t get any visitors.
Low competition.
You should target the keywords you can rank for by producing higher quality content than existing ones.
Relevant to your business
You should only rank for the keywords which are relevant to your business.
Many people avail of the services of SEO Canberra, which is a digital marketing agency that provides different types of SEO services to its clients.
5. Creating search-optimized content
Whether you are optimizing existing pages or creating new ones, you should follow some basic fundamental rules to get the highest possible performance.
– Provide a great user experience.
What your site looks like and how people interact with it can greatly impact your SEO. If you have a very slow website or your content is very hard to read, many people will leave and never come back. This could hurt your rankings.
Hence, your website needs to provide-
Fast-loading pages.
Legible text.
User-friendly mobile experience.
Seamless navigation.
– Powerful copywriting
When you create content for your website or blog, it is imperative to follow best practices of copywriting, such as-
No grammar mistakes.
Short content.
Try avoiding redundancy.
– Clean technical SEO.
As you build out your pages, you should also add Meta information that helps Google and all the other search engines know what your content is about. The most essential elements are page title, Meta description and URL. Your snippet should be compelling and relevant to the search query. If it is up to mark, your chances of attracting potential customers are better.
Most of the website builders and content management systems out there will also let you edit these elements.
6. Backlink building
Receiving a link from a third-party website indicates that you are providing quality content, which is why backlinks are one of Google’s top-ranking factors. Most backlinks are generated organically, and the best digital marketers have an outreach strategy designed to boost their profile.
7. Keyword research
You should first try to determine what all keywords you want to target, and just like traditional keyword research, you should focus on the topics with search volume and low competition. To determine what competition you will face, you should see if the top-ranking videos are high quality or not. If the videos are low quality or don’t answer the search query, it will be much easier to outrank them with your videos.
8. Reviews
According to a survey, the online reviews influence the decision of 93% of the consumers. Even if the marketing channels are performing well, having poor reviews can hold you back from converting your site visitors to your customers. You should ensure that you have a sufficient number of positive reviews which create trust with the potential customers. For maximizing their impact, the reviews need to be recent and credible.
9. Social media
The importance of social media in your digital marketing strategy will vary based on the nature of your business. Visual businesses tend to do well on social media platforms like Instagram. However, the B2B products and services perform better on Linkedin. You might need to use several social media platforms for your business.
One of the biggest mistakes of online marketing is trying to be on every platform and constantly post content even when the results are not favourable.
10. Email marketing
One of the most scalable online marketing strategies is email marketing and it can be used to-
– Nurture new leads.
– Onboard new customers.
– Boost revenue from your previous customer base.