If you are still investing money in yellow pages print advertising and display ads in the newspaper without doing as much as you can to improve your local online advertising, then you are missing out on the huge number of local customers who use the Internet to find the businesses they want to patronize. Improving your local SEO means enhancing your website to meet your local marketing needs, and utilizing the growing number of tools that are available to help expose your business to a larger local audience.
Enhance Your Use Of Online Tools
The days of ignoring the Internet are over, which means your company needs some kind of online presence if you want to gain more clients. If you don’t have a website, then you should at least register your business with Google’s MyBusiness program and create the most comprehensive Google profile you can. Sometimes all customers want is basic information about your business and registering your business with Google will provide your customers with the information they need and put you in the search engine results.
Online reviews are critical to enhancing the ability of your customers to find your business online, and you need to spend time each day updating your business profiles on the various business review sites and encouraging your customers to leave reviews. Do some research and find out which are the most popular review sites in your industry and start there.
Develop Your Links
Google will enhance your business’s status on search engine results page if you work on getting quality and relevant companies to link to your website. An important part of solid SEO is to swap links with local businesses that can help to boost your company’s status.
It is important to only use links from businesses that you have had actual contact with and not buy links. Google will penalize your website if you use purchased links. You should also be sure to swap links with local businesses that are complimentary in some way to your business. For example, a local amateur sports team would benefit from swapping links with a popular local sporting goods store.
Clean Up Your Website
A comprehensive local SEO program focuses on the elements on the pages of your website and their ability to enhance your search engine status. All of the page titles, content, and headlines within content should have local SEO keywords and information that will help point the search engines in your direction. You should also make sure that your site is optimized for peak performance by making sure your links are valid, your coding is clean, and your site map is comprehensive.
If your business relies on local customers, then it is critically important that you focus on maximizing your local SEO practices. Google and other search engines have excellent SEO tools for businesses that will help to put your business at the top of local business search engine results. If your company does not have a website, then Google can help you out by offering you a business profile that will reach customers.
It is time to put aside the phone book and spend your local marketing resources on your online presence. The chances are that most of your customers and potential customers are online, and you are missing out on a lot of revenue when you avoid maximizing your local SEO.