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Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial to your business’s success in your target local market as a local business or company seeking to establish a strong presence. Your audience is actively looking for the exact type of products and services you provide, and they do it via a search engine. Do you want to miss out on valuable local searches that could bring customers to your website or through your doors? Ummmm… I didn’t think so! Below are 20 essentials for a great regional SEO strategy.
1. Optimize Your Google Business Listing
One of the most common mistakes businesses desiring a solid local presence make is overlooking the immense value of a verified, robust Google Business listing. It takes you, or let’s face it, an intern, less than 30 minutes to accomplish and will reap your business and your company a wealth of incoming website traffic, phone calls, store visits, etc.
Google Business is the lifeblood that feeds the search engine results that your target audience is looking for. It is further amplified as a local business looking to reach local customers. Google Business is also heavily integrated through various applications and features that many use on mobile devices or web browsers.
2. Utilize Social Media
Social media is now a proven tool for businesses to achieve concrete results and tangible goals. It also generates a wealth of SEO-friendly backlinks to your website, which will only double your search rankings.
3. Reach Out for Reviews
When did you last make a significant purchase without a preliminary search on a product or service? When conducting that search, how much value do you place on customer reviews posted on a company website or even a second-party website like Amazon by a complete and total stranger?
Indeed, your prospective target audience is actively perusing the internet to learn more about your company, products, services, or experiences before opening their wallets or committing. Please take advantage of this by contacting satisfied customers for their reviews. You can direct them to a specific website via a link, utilize an in-email platform to rate their experience or have them respond directly.
4. Use SEO-Friendly URLs
Many people overlook the URLs themselves when considering their search engine optimization strategy. This can be a major mistake that can penalize that website regarding the organic search rankings it could receive. On the other hand, search engines appreciate and reward clean, well-written URLs that relate very closely to the page topic they cover.
For example, www.yourwebsite.com/1234/567/find_info will not get any benefits in the eyes and rankings of search engines compared to a URL that describes exactly what that website is about. Google can also flag it as a “spammy link,” leading to a potential penalty that will hurt your site’s search rankings.
5. Don’t Forget SEO Titles and Descriptions
Small or mid-sized companies often forget about the “backend” search engine optimization or technical SEO. However, one significant element still in style as 2023 rolls in is the inclusion of meta titles and descriptions. Most website platforms have a tab dedicated to this that is relatively easy to use. Simply put, it is well worth it to take the time to write your page titles and meta descriptions to appeal to both search engines and the reader.
6. Pay Attention to Backend SEO as Well as Frontend SEO
Rarely the leadership within a business doesn’t understand the importance of search engine optimization in today’s world. However, they may not be aware of the importance placed on optimizing the backend elements of their website and how much they contribute to gaining higher search rankings.
These backend SEO elements are also called technical search engine optimization elements. Make sure you’ve not just paid attention to having excellent content on your website, but you’ve done the “nitty-gritty”. This includes ensuring you have a proper sitemap and submitting it to Google. It also includes ensuring all your pages are indexed on an ongoing basis.
7. Get Backlinks, Get Referrals
Backlinks, also called inbound links, are essential to any SEO strategy. Search engines place the highest importance on these links when they look at link elements as part of their ranking results. The more websites with different domains that link people back to your website, the more relevance that top search engines give you in their ranking process. Who doesn’t want to be more relevant to Google?
A higher backlink volume also leads to increased referral traffic, generating more potential leads on your website. It’s a win, wins!
8. Use Outbound Links and Internal Links to get Credibility
Outbound links are links included within your website’s content, blog, etc., that direct the reader to a different website/domain. Search engines give your website a higher authority ranking and more Credibility when you include high-quality outbound links within your content. It shows that your website is credible enough to source other pages and that you “play nice” with these high-quality websites that are likely within your industry. Don’t forget that you should only link to credible websites that likely have a high domain authority when you include an outbound link on your website.
Internal linking, also referred to as interlinking, includes links within content or on specific pages that will take page visitors to other pages on your website. These internal links help your SEO results by creating a better site experience and customer journey for your website visitors, making your site look better to search engines and rank more positively.
15. Don’t Forget Schema
Schema, or structured data markup, is still relevant to local SEO, especially for businesses with physical locations. Therefore, you should work on polishing schemas if you own or operate a local business. In layperson’s terms, this is an addition to the code of a particular script on your website’s page designed for search eng.
16. Leverage the Power of Google Maps
Include a Google map of your business’s location(s) directly within your Contact Us or About page to flash the green light for search engines to recognize you as a local business with a physical location.
17. Yes, NAHP Is Still Relevant
In the age of the mobile phone, many companies don’t think much about their NAHP: name, address, hours, and phone number. However, people are still looking for these items and will actively click them from your website to transfer to the app on their phone or tablet that closely matches what they are trying to accomplish.
18. Know Your Keywords and Key Phrases, But Don’t Over-do It
As a local business, you must know the keywords and key phrases you wish to rank for in relevant searches. These should be naturally woven into your content.
Don’t forget that today’s search engines are more than equipped to recognize when content is utilizing “keyword stuffing.” This is when the author or content creator stuffs a desirable keyword or keyphrase into the content repeatedly, believing it will achieve higher search rankings. The opposite is true. Most major search engines will penalize your website for “keyword stuffing.”
19. Be In the Know About Your Site’s Local Rankings
It is important to remember that local SEO and search rankings differ significantly from general SEO and ranking results. Modern major search engines, like Google, have optimized their search results based on the physical location you are searching from. Therefore, as a local business, you must know how search results for target keywords and key phrases vary from place to site.
If your rankings are not doing so well for local search terms and you own a brick-and-mortar shop, check out this brick-and-mortar small business marketing quiz for local SEO.
20. Never Forget About Mobile
Finally, don’t disregard the importance of your website’s mobile optimization when it comes to your search engine optimization considerations. Sites not optimized for mobile phone or tablet views are now tangibly penalized in search rankings. In addition, it is now proven that if a user searches from a mobile device or tablet, search results provided by top search engines will rank websites optimized for a mobile higher.
Search engines are no fools. They know when you are on a mobile device and want to provide you with the best mobile experience possible, meaning they are less likely to prioritize non-mobile websites and, hence, better SEO.
Utilizing these 20 essential elements and strategies will help your company’s website build a strong local SEO strategy to bring in business and achieve your company’s goals actively. Think of it like having someone working for you all the time, day and night, without you having to pay them. That’s what great search rankings can do for your business.