Ten Great Local SEO Tips for Small Businesses

In 2022, SEO remains as relevant as ever. In this article, we’ll share valuable SEO tips that can deliver impressive results for small businesses.

Add Your Business to Directories

Start with Google My Business, according to professional companies that provide SEO services for small businesses. Companies that are listed there become visible on Google Maps. This search engine suggests them to users in the sidebar of search results pages.

Include this information in your Google My Business profile:

• Name of your company
• Contact details
• Opening hours
• Photo of the exterior of the building where your office is located
• Call to action
• Keywords

Consider adding your business to Yelp!, Facebook, Bing, MapQuest, YellowPages and industry-specific directories.

Strive to Get Numerous Client Reviews

Here are the most efficient ways of politely asking your clients to leave reviews about you:

• Send them emails to say “Thank you for the purchase and your review!”
• Leave a reminder on a paper receipt or a business card
• Offer them bonus points for leaving a review and let them spend these points on purchases on your website

Selected directories, such as Yelp!, prohibit directly asking for reviews. Others, like Google My Business, don’t mind it.

Improve Your Mobile Website

Here are two important facts to remember:

1. Over 80% of all mobile searches are local
2. If your website takes over 3 seconds to load, over half of its visitors will leave it

You can choose responsive templates from the onset. Alternatively, you may resort to plugins to make your website more mobile-friendly. It’s important to choose a hosting plan that guarantees high load speed and helps your website cope with traffic spikes.

The faster your mobile pages load, the higher your Google ranking.

Identify Local Keywords

When analyzing keywords, focus not on the area where you live but on those territories where your clients order your products. For instance, you customize t-shirts and most of your clients are from California. In this case, “customized t-shirts California” will be the most straightforward broad keyword. Long-tail keywords will look like “customize white female t-shirts in California”. Such word combinations more precisely reveal customers’ intent.

If your clients come from several locations, mention all of them in your keywords: “customized t-shirts California”, “customized t-shirts New York”, “customized t-shirts Florida” and so on.

Focus on Local Content

All the top companies that provide local SEO services recommend blogging on their website. To make the most of it in terms of SEO, you should:

• Add new content regularly
• Make it informative (share tutorials, how-to’s and answers to popular questions)
• Structure it with subheadings and bullet points
• Use metatags, keywords and descriptions

If your content is generic, it will have to compete with articles from other geographic locations. To reduce the number of competitors, make your content focused on your area.

Let’s imagine that you offer nail services. To create a helpful and popular local article, make a list of the best nail salons in your area.

Optimize Web Page SEO

Here are the three main web page SEO tips:

• Add an interactive Google Map, your business citation and client testimonials on your website
• Create a separate landing page for every region that you target
• Upload unique content on each of these pages

If you comply with the second rule but simply copy and paste the content for each page, Google will penalize you.

Ensure Consistent Citations

A business citation is the name, address and phone number of your company. Make sure all the sources that provide this information spell it in a uniform manner. Even the lack of a comma in one source and its presence in another one can have a negative impact on your ranking.

Build a Portfolio of Local Backlinks

To get local backlinks, you can:

• Compose a list of local websites with high authority, get in touch with their owners and offer guest posts to them
• Organize press conferences, presentations or other events and invite local media and bloggers to attend them
• Send out your products to local media and bloggers for reviews

The more third-party websites provide backlinks to yours, the more credible your web resource seems to search engines.

Structure Your Data

To enable search engines to discover and properly display the crucial data about your business, you should resort to markup. Place your contact details, client reviews and postal address in meta descriptions. If your site is built on WordPress, install a plugin that will take care of the markup.

Get Social

When ranking websites, Google takes three key factors into account:

1. Relevance
2. Distance
3. Prominence

The latter reveals the popularity of your company. To boost it, you should encourage discussion on social networks.

It’s not enough to share the link to the latest article from your blog on Facebook. Instead, it would be smarter to run a competition. To join it, users will have to share your content and tag their friends.