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Local SEO Tips in 2020 For Small Business Owners

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Have you got any idea how important is to have a local SEO strategy in place for your business? According to Google, 46% of searches are for a local business. which means, people rely on Google to find a local business, Not having a local online strategy means you are missing out a big time.

I will try to help you understand some local SEO tips, which will help you to get a good ranking on Google search.

What does actually mean by Local SEO?

Local SEO (Local Search Engine Optimisation), is a great way to market your local business services or products at exact time the local customers are searching in Google for it. For example, a person who wants to have a hair cut will use his smartphone to Google ” hair salon near me ” or ” hair salon in (suburb)”. Bringing your business on top of Google for this query is local SEO.

The main local search ranking factors are:

Google My Business: GMB is the main player in Local SEO. Google reviews also adds more value to your business by providing a platform for you to get and display reviews from your happy customers. Not only that, this listing can showcase your services, internal-external photos, operating hours, contact numbers and any current offers that you have. You can create your one if you don’t have already from here.

GoogleMyBusiness

Keywords: Let me put this in a simple word as I can. Keywords are the words people type on Google search engine to find anything on the Internet. Selecting the right keywords for your business is very important as your conversions will vastly depend on this.

Links: Quality relevant links to your website from others will help to rank your website’s in Google search results. When some other website are linked to your website, it potentially can generate more traffic but more importantly, it will indicate Google that your website is trustworthy.

User Experience: Starting from the website navigation, whole user experience on your website can affect your google rankings. It helps Google to know how easily a user can interact with your website. Also always must have good relevant quality content on the website.

A hint: If you need help with any of the above ranking factors, you can do a Google search for local SEO company or local digital marketing company or try to search as best digital…….

My new Local SEO Tips For 2020:

Go for Google My Business

Strong advice, you need this as a local business this is a must. Why? It’s FREE and this will give your business on Google Maps. This will increase dramatically your chances of showing up on a Google search dramatically and also people will be able to find your business on any device. More importantly, this will give your business a platform to showcase your happy client’s reviews. I’m 100% sure, you’ll find in all SEO guides and articles saying you to have one, so what are you waiting for? If you don’t have one, click here to register.

Creating Local Listings is essential

Oh! Google MY Business is not the only one place, there are so many other online directory listing website that you can list your company. As a business, you must list your companies in all of these places, but there is a very important tip when you doing this. That is, to make sure you have always the same information everywhere, which means that your listing should be consistent.

Optimize website content for local keywords

Doing on-page SEO for the website contents to local keywords. There are online tools where you can actually check your on-page SEO score. As this is a very important step, you can consult a digital marketing company to get help on this.

Create Local service Pages

You can create website pages to target local areas, if you have shopfronts in a different location, And on GMB also, you can add all locations.

Start a blog

A blog is a good option as this will allow you to demonstrate your expertise on your products/services, provide users with in-depth knowledge. Also it helps you to drive more traffic and a good way to increase the trust score to get higher rankings & results.

Optimize Title Tag, Meta Description for CTR

This is the basics. I believe we all know what is this and how important to have a good title & meta description to have good conversions to your website. So this is a must again Please keep local keywords in mind, when you working on this.

Improve Website Loading Speed

No one likes to wait till a website loads right? So this is a very important factor. You can use tools like Pingdom/Google Page Speed to test your website speed and optimize it. A Normal website should load within 7s and page size should be less than 3MB.

Mobile Friendly

Clearly when Google published mobile-first index as best practises, which means, everyone to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. So let’s make sure it to gain better ranking.

Social Media Sharing or Marketing Strategy

Now Facebook & all other social media platforms become another place to market your services and products. Even though this has no direct impact on ranking this will certainly help with the social signals to search engines. You can generate these by doing creating/sharing posts or doing social media marketing campaigns.

Create Local Backlinks

As backlinks are very important factor in SEO ranking, you need to try to acquire high quality links from relevant websites in your industry. It can be a link from your supplier or from a local blog, where they write about your product/services.

SSL Certificate

Most of the companies ignore the SSL certificate, why you need it? Because otherwise, chrome will show that your website is not secure and this will not help you to gain your customer’s confidence to use your website. Not having an SSL certificate installed on your website can cause problems on your ranking for the very same reason that we discuss earlier. So it is strongly recommended to have one.

Local Press/Media & Local Forums/Q&A Platform

Use local press, especially online newspapers to do brand advertising which will help you in ranking strategy. Also try to be active in local forums/Q&A sites. This will vastly help you to build a good reputation among the local community, which will result in gaining more local traffic to your website. it will definitely help with your website ranking.

Conclusion:

I believe this will work for Local SEO in 2020, and this will help to gain good local rankings in search engines plus conversions for your local business. Local SEO will help your business to grow locally, which will eventually enhance the potential to reach your business on a large scale too.

This list is a big ask for a small business owner, who doesn’t familiar with all of these. So let us worry about this and you keep focusing on developing your business. As a Digital Marketing Agency we can help you with this. Please contact us today!