The most important aspect for small businesses is that their website should show up on the first page of local searches for the relevant audience. It’s only through proper local SEO that you will find your website on top of search results. Local SEO not just helps in promoting your website but also brands your business online. Local SEO is vital for many reasons.
- It helps you get more local customers
- It helps build your brand
- It helps in driving targeted traffic
- It provides a better conversion rate
- It allows users to interact with your business
There are a variety of strategies that can be used to boost your online presence and gain attention to your local business. Here we have discussed the top 3 among them that works great in the upcoming future.
Events Marketing
Events are significant in helping you reach your niche/geographical audience and gain visibility in Google search. Let’s start with explaining the search engine result features that are available for ‘event’ based searches.
Google Event Carousel & the Events Pack
The event carousel is a search engine results feature that displays 16 results above the fold. When a user clicks on a result, he’s redirected to a new search results page. The events pack is another feature similar to that of the local pack, which sends you to the event search experience and eventually to the event page crawled by Google. Getting listed in the events pack is highly advantageous for any business because you get a chance to rank in a position higher than the first organic result. Use the below tips if you want to promote your local event effectively.
- Event Schema – Follow Google’s guidelines on how and where to implement schema markup for events
- Content – Make sure your content has the best source of information for the events
- Use Event Keywords – It’s important to optimize your event names using keywords that’ll do better in search
- Build Quality Links – By building high-quality links for your event pages, you’re making Google find and rank your events faster
- Ticketing Sites – Get listed in event marketing sites; they act an excellent event promotion platform and also allows an option to purchase tickets
Citation Building
Citations are mentions of your business name, address and phone number (NAP) on external website sources and directories. They are similar to backlinks and are capable of giving you a ranking boost. These citations are used by search engine bots to determine the accuracy and relevance of your business information. Working on citation building will provide a more enhanced web presence to your business and eventually higher rankings. Listed below are the top benefits of local citations;
- Citations help attract the right kind of attention to your local business
- Citations are cost-effective compared to paid ads
- Citations increase your chances of ranking in Google local-3 pack
- Citations give your business a visibility boost
- Citations not just attract potential clients but investors also
Focus on Voice Search
Voice search is important because it is more likely to go together with local SEO. One recent study finds that almost half of voice search users look for local businesses such as restaurants, shopping centers, etc. on a daily basis. The process of voice search optimization includes certain basic tasks such as finding long-tail keywords, creating answer-driven content, etc., and also taking care of technical SEO factors like page loading speed, mobile-readiness, structured data, and image optimization. Here’re a few tips on how to optimize for voice search;
- Think logically, like how people would be searching for your business when traveling or doing something
- Improve page speed; it would improve your chance of showing up in a voice search
- Create simple, easy-to-read and highly engaging contents to better rank for voice searches
- Add featured snippets and structured data, more than 40% of voice searches are answered from these snippets
- Take mobile optimization seriously, Google now uses mobile-first indexing and so it’s important to focus on how your site looks for real on mobile devices
Final Thoughts
These 3 local SEO strategies are a great start if you’re looking to promote your local business in 2019. However, there are also techniques that will help better, such as creating an excellent user experience, social media optimization for locally focused content, building up community groups for engaging customers, etc.
