Local SEO… 4 underrated strategies to success
The craze of web has penetrated into our lives so deeply that even tangible businesses can’t live without online marketing.
A recent Google report noted that Google searches containing “near me” have increased 34X since 2011
Now matter how big or small your business is, you have to have your strong online presence. Be it a doctor around the corner of the street, a fast food joint, a big educational institute… you can find almost everyone in the search results, with their physical address, web address, operational timings, geographic location route and its reviews. This is what we call local SEO. But there are many things, that most people generally don’t know about it or we often tend to ignore.
Website
Website plays a very important role in local ranking of your business, however, having a website is not mandatory for local business. But having a well optimized website with good location pages can add bonus points in your kitty. While crawling the website if spiders come across good location pages having maps and all elements that help the users, it would tend to rank it better. Although, there are certain businesses that have website but not very good one… they have to struggle more than good business websites.
Reviews
Before investing time and money in your business, potential customers would like to know how you serve. Serve good and encourage your customers to leave reviews of your products or services. A few times back google rolled out the algorithm with which reviews of product or service or organization can be seen against the listing in the search results. This helps the user a lot in making a decision whether to choose your company from the listing or not. And if you he chooses your company on the basis of ratings, you have already convinced him halfway through.
Accuracy
It is very important to have accuracy and consistency in your listing, website and NAP (name, address and phone number). The better you put up all your information, the more it has chances to get ranked high. This is something for which you don’t get penalized for repeating or duplicating. However, description in the tags and other information in the content has to be unique. You must keep this thing in mind while listing your business on different online directories. Discrepancy may cost you many potential customers.
A Constant Contact survey revealed some discouraging trends among SMBs. While 85 percent of small businesses say that it’s important for them to be found on local search apps and directories, only half of these businesses have ever updated their online listings! Fifty percent of these businesses know they have inaccurate listings, but 70 percent say that they just don’t have the time to update them at all!
See, if you keep a bit of attention towards your listings, you have great chances of success.
Google Plus
I must say that 90% of the webmasters optimize their website keeping Google rankings in mind and why not? It is one of the most used search engine across world. And when Google has its own social platform in the arena why would it give more importance to other social sites. Having a good Google plus page might help you a lot in maintain your Google business rankings. However, it surely consider reviews and ratings from other websites. You cannot promote your business listing in search engine, but you can definitely promote your G plus page to get better local organic rankings. The more followers you have, the more business you build.
The key to gain success in local optimization is consistency and freshness. Although, you cannot create fresh tangible addresses all the time, but you can create local content in the interest of generic audience.
I hope you aren’t ignoring all these bullets in your local optimization campaign. If yes, rectify your mistakes right away before you lose a big share of customers.
