If you run a brick-and-mortar / local business, chances are you don’t have an effective online presence and have ignored local SEO altogether. For those who don’t know, local SEO is the practice of optimizing a local business online for location-based keywords, such as ‘Carpet cleaners in New York’.
In a world where 46% of all the searches have ‘local intent’, showing up on the first page of Google can be a crucial factor to be a thriving local business. Since 74% of people do a local search on their smartphones before visiting a store, if your business doesn’t show up when someone searches on the internet, then there is a good chance that they won’t know you exist.
Combining that with the fact that “near me” searches have grown 150% faster than traditional searches — you get the idea of why your local business needs to online.
Even if you don’t have to resources to hire an SEO expert or the time to it yourself, these oversimplified critical steps will ensure your local business will be visible to your local audience.
1. Map out your primary keyword
Some of the key elements that need to be optimized on your website are — page title, URL, and meta description. You need to include your primary keyword in all those elements.
If you are a carpet cleaner serves in the Boston area, you need to optimize your keyword around ‘Boston’ and ‘Carpet cleaning’
You could do something like, ‘Boston, MA Carpet Cleaners | Carpet & Upholstery Cleaning’ for your page titles and www.bostoncarpetcleaners.com or www.petescarpetcleaning.com/locations/boston for website URLs.
Meta descriptions don’t count much towards ranking but they’re incredibly useful in search results. They are the short summaries you write about your page, which show on search results. For the same roofing contractor, you can write something like — ‘Pete’s Carpet Cleanup is the best cleaning service company in the carpet, upholstery & rugs cleaning industry in Eastern Massachusetts. Get a free cleaning estimate today’.
2. Set up important services and tracking
Set up the tools and services you’ll need to track the search performance and analyze data. There are a couple of tools and services you can use, but I recommend these 3 absolutely necessary services for your online growth
The most important among all is Google search console. It helps you with insights on how search engines interact with your website and keep track of your search performance.
The second is Google analytics. It tracks and reports the traffic to your website. It helps you analyze your website’s data better.
The third one is Facebook’s retargeting pixel. It helps you keep your brand in front of your potential customers even after they’ve left your website.
3. Accessibility and crawl
Once you set up your Google search console. Crawl or inspect the website with the search console and submit it to Google. This will ensure your website will be found by Google bot when someone searches on the internet.
If some error occurs, you don’t have to worry about every single crawl issue.
The most severe issues like 404s, 500s, and duplicate content can be solved by ‘rel=canonical’ tag or a 301 redirect. Broken links can be fixed by changing the link into something that’s not broken and Missing/bad titles and thin or no contents should be taken care of immediately.
Make sure you don’t have any of these crawl errors present.
4. Setup Google My Business
Google My Business is a HUGE ranking factor in local search results. GMB is a free and simplified dashboard that helps your business information available to a variety of different Google search results.
In addition to the wider visibility for your business, you also get detailed information on how and where consumers are searching for your business and much more when you set up your GMB listing.
5. Local citations
Citations are the mention of your business on the internet, which usually displays your business name, address, and phone number — commonly called NAP (Name, Address, Phone).
You can list your business on numerous online listings like Yelp and Yellowpages. Google identifies your business is mentioned from the presence of your NAP info and you get credit for this mention. The more mentions your business gets from the web, the more prominent your business appears to Google.
Local citations are the secret weapon that can take your business website to the first page of Google results.
Bonus : Set up an automated lead generation funnel
An automated lead generation funnel helps you capture the details of your website visitors and turn them into paying customers. You can build a steady flow of inbound leads from your website by setting up an automated lead generation funnel on your website
Conclusion
It doesn’t cost a fortune to get decent online exposure for your local business. On the contrary, if your business doesn’t show up on the local searches you’re leaving money on the table. Keeping these 5 steps in mind you can launch your local business online the right way and start getting leads.
Get the online launch checklist
If you want to know how to launch your business online in the right way, then this is the perfect guide for you. This is a comprehensive checklist that gives you the steps you need to launch your local business online