Local Businesses Need To Leverage The Power of SEO

What is Local Search Engine Optimization?

Local Search Engine Optimization is a marketing term for the process of designing, building and optimizing online properties (websites, social media, YouTube videos etc.) that improve the visibility of YOUR company in online searches and rankings. The purpose of SEO is to position your listings where people who are searching for your services or products will see them ahead of your competition.

We could glaze your eyes with nerdy marketing statistics, make your ears bleed with geeky digital speak, and dazzle you with our claims of experience and wizardry. But you’re busy so let’s cut to the chase (you can request a call with me anytime and hear loads of digital marketing wisdom). We would like to throw a couple of important facts your way though.

If you’re looking for steady growth and long-term revenue streams in your business plan, and you market your products and services online (what business doesn’t?), a proper SEO strategy should be the cornerstone of your marketing strategy.

Do you want to outgrow your competition, dominate the market in your area, and be the “go-to” company that people see when they search online for your services and products? Then getting and executing a good SEO plan is the key!

The Basics of Local Search Engine Optimization

If you’d like to know more about SEO for your business, we’ll give you the basics here. But before we go there you need to understand one important thing about SEO; it DOES NOT give immediate results and is not get-rich-quick!

Be careful because there are plenty of inexperienced marketers and even absolute scammers out there who will promise you the moon, guarantee that they’ll have your business ranked at the top of Google searches quickly, and get you instant leads. That’s just not reality.

The way to get your company to the top of search results in your market, keep it there for the long haul, and establish it as the authority for your products and services, is to do good research in your markets and locations, craft a plan utilizing proven techniques that work, and then track the results and make adjustments.

It takes a lot expertise and experience to do SEO properly. We highly recommend that you interview digital marketing pros who have a proven track record of success with local businesses, and find someone who fits your needs and style.

The goal of local search engine optimization efforts is to gain visibility for your company or organization online, where people looking for what you offer see it and, preferably, before your competition. Although there are many search engines for internet users, Google is still by far the most popular, so most SEO techniques are aimed at getting Google to increase visibility of the client’s property. Google uses a very sophisticated algorithm that “crawls” the entire internet 24/7/365 and complies data. Our goal is to have Google find enough data on your business that it deems relevant, to rank your business at the top of searches.

At the top of Google searches is a thing called a “map pack” which shows its top three listings for the search performed, in a map format with location data. For local businesses, being in this map pack is critical to boosting visibility and customer interactions, responses and leads. Your business NEEDS to be in that map pack! Google considers three factors to be most important when ranking listings in its map pack; Relevance, Prominence, and Distance, so we work very hard to make YOUR business relevant, prominent and have the proper location in Google’s view.

Having said that, the following is a brief description of some of the basic building blocks of good SEO for local companies.

Search Engine Optimizing elements fall into two categories; On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. Some of these elements in each are fairly obvious and some are very techy and reside in the background where you never see them. We won’t even try to explain or even list all of them in detail, but here is a brief description of the most important ones.

ON PAGE SEO

As you may guess, on-page SEO elements are things that optimize your web pages to enhance their standing in search results. Here’s the major ones, in no particular order.

– Content is still king in the SEO realm. Content encompasses anything built on a web page like text, images, graphics and videos. While there are lots of marketers out there trying to figure out how to trick Google into ranking their efforts better and quicker with some “magic sauce” that they’ve dreamed up, good quality content is still the most important thing to Google. The goal of Google in search is to provide the best possible results for a searchers query. Knowing what Google wants, and providing it on web pages, is the main objective of any reputable SEO marketing pro. We could write a whole book (many people have) about what good content for SEO is and how to craft it. For now, let’s just say that identifying the most relevant content for your company’s market niche by doing quality research, and including it in the content of your website pages, is the cornerstone of SEO. There’s a lot of other techy stuff involved like title tags, meta tags, and geo tags, but we suggest you leave that to the professionals (that would be us of course!).

–  Internal links greatly help SEO efforts. These are links between different pages on your company website. Done properly, links will show search engines that your website and content are credible. Done poorly, links can actually hurt your SEO efforts and ranking. An experienced SEO marketer knows how to make these work for you. Are you seeing a pattern about how important good digital marketing pros are? Of course, we’re trying to sell ourselves to you, but this is just a fact. Be careful, there’s a lot of poor marketers out there willing to take your money and run!

– Location pages get overlooked by most web designers when they build a site, because it doesn’t usually add to the flavor or style of what they’re building. Location pages are separate pages for cities, towns or areas that your business operates in, that are loaded with information about those locations. Any good SEO expert knows that location pages, even if hidden, add a great deal to your company’s credibility and authority with search engines. We see a lot of digital marketers ignore adding location pages to websites, but we know how valuable they really are. That’s okay we’ll just outrank them for you!

– Blog posts are sometimes forgotten these days as well. Just about any type of business can have a blog with posts that explain their products or services to their readers. They can also just be informational about the markets that your customers are in. A custom cabinet company website with a blog with lots of posts about all the different styles of cabinets, finishes, and accessories available, posts about how to finance remodeling projects, and any number of topics specific to that market, will outrank a website of a competitors site without a blog, all day long!

OFF PAGE SEO

Off page SEO is just what you probably think; building digital properties outside of your company website, that add juice to your visibility in Google’s algorithm. Here are the major elements of a good off page SEO strategy.

– Google offers every business a free listing called a Google Business Profile. Anyone can build one for any company, and it is a HUGE ranking factor on Google. GBPs can include lots of information for your business like a description of your products and services, your logo, photos and videos, location, operating hours, and lots more. Google LOVES their GBPs so building one correctly and then consistently and frequently updating and adding to it, is very important to SEO efforts and getting ranked highly.

– Citations for your company online are very important to SEO and ranking. For SEO purposes, citations are any reference to a business that shows its Name, Address and Phone number (commonly called the NAP). The previously mentioned Google Business Profile is the most important citation for your business, but there are many others, and you want to create as many as possible as they are an important ranking factor. A Facebook business page, a Yelp profile, local business listings, a Better Business Bureau account, and many others are all citations. Anyplace that lists your company’s NAP is a citation. It is critically important that ALL citations for your company have the exact same information! Google penalizes heavily if your NAP info is not completely consistent so it is important that they all have the name spelled the same, the address is exactly the same and of course that they all have the same contact phone number.

– Social media posts are a ranking factor for search engines too, so posting to as many social media sites as possible, consistently and often, helps increase your company’s visibility a lot. Here’s a pro tip that is often overlooked; a robust YouTube page with a lot of properly produced and relevant videos gives a major boost to ranking.

– Backlinks are important! What’s a backlink? A backlink is a link from a web page other than one of your company’s pages, that has a link in it back to one of your pages. For example, if you’re in the asphalt paving business, and a paving industry blog writes an article that includes a link back to one of your pages, that’s a backlink. Google loves backlinks as they believe they add relevance to your business. There are lots of ways to build backlinks, too many to list here. Building backlinks is a tedious process but adds a great deal to ranking and visibility of a business. SEO pros are experts at creating backlinks.

There is one other SEO element that spans both on-page and off-page and that is reviews of your businesses products or services. Reviews are huge in Google’s ranking factors, and should not be ignored! Reviews on your website but, more importantly on other sites like your GBP, Facebook page, Yelp listing and anywhere else, should be requested, cultivated and responded to. A steady stream of reviews with responses is big for search engine ranking.

WHEW! It’s a lot we know, but don’t let this overview of Local Search Engine Optimization plans overwhelm or discourage you. Your business doesn’t need everything we showed here, and any of them individually help ranking.

What you need to do to get your business ranked where you want it in searches is highly dependent on a lot of factors specific to your situation like the locations you operate in, the amount of your competition in your market niche, the SEO competency of those competitors, and many other technical details.

Just take this away; if you want to improve your company’s visibility online, for the purpose of growth and more sales revenue, it will take a consistent long-term plan, based on your goals and budget, but it will be well worth it. Owners that are looking to build stable and profitable companies in the digital age will be highly rewarded for investing the time and money to build a robust digital footprint using proper search engine optimization strategies. The return on investment is well worth it.

Contact us here for a free initial consultation and evaluation. I’ll personally create a free video review of your current online marketing, give you some free tips, and help you decide if an SEO plan is right for your business.