Sometimes you hear a lot about marketing strategies that make your local business or local store more visible to customers. But if you have not considered local SEO solutions, you’re missing out on ample opportunities and big time.
Local SEO solutions help your community business reach more customers in your area that are likely to shop at your store. You can also increase revenue and sales using local SEO solutions — growing your business year after year.
Boost Your Local SEO Strategy with 7 Local SEO Solutions
When you create a local SEO strategy, it’s essential to try every possible action to achieve something leaving no stone unturned.
Read on to learn more about 7 local SEO solutions to help you attract more customers than ever before.
1. Claim your Google My Business listing
The foremost and vital step to build a local SEO strategy is to claim your business listing on Google My Business.
When you register your business on Google, you’ll certainly provide the following information:
- Company name
- Address and phone number
- Website
- Hours of operation
- Logo
- Images of your business
- Products and services
- Payment methods
Provide information to request different types of customers.
Did we mention that claiming your business listing is free? There’s no excuse to not follow this step!
2. Submit your information to online directories
The more online real estate you claim, the better. That’s why submitting your information to online directories is an essential local SEO factor.
You’ll submit precisely the same info that you would submit to Google My Business, like your company’s name, its hours of operation, and contact information.
These online directories include websites like:
- Yelp
- Bing
- Yellow Book
- HubSpot
- Angie’s List
- Apple Maps
When you submit your data to these directories, you continue to build your brand authority, thus attracting more customers to your local store.
3. Build your social media existence
Social media profiles offer more online real estate for claiming business listings! With multiple social media networks, there are a wide variety of opportunities to use your social media profiles to benefit from your local SEO strategy.
You can create social media accounts for your business on platforms such as:
- Snapchat
These are the 4 basic social media networks that can benefit your business, and it’s free to create accounts on each one of them!
Here’s how each platform can help you to increase local SEO efforts.
Facebook: Facebook retains the largest user base, with around 2.38 billion active users. Creating a Facebook account for your local business will help you to create brand awareness with interested consumers. One advantage of Facebook for local SEO is customers’ ability to check in to your company and promote their friends to check it out too.
Snapchat: Snapchat allows users to take and send an image to your friends, and post videos and pictures that disappear from the stories 24 hours. The advantage of using Snapchat for local SEO is to allow businesses to purchase ads that typically create brand buzz and promote local business events.
Twitter: Twitter is an excellent platform for local businesses because of its huge following, i.e., with 330 million monthly active users. You can create brand awareness, post videos, and pictures to your timeline, and your followers can retweet them too. It also allows you to offer great customer service with its direct message feature.
Instagram: Instagram allows you to show off your brand’s personality. You can post images of your employees, your products, and your space with captions to encourage and attract the audience to visit your storefront.
4. Interact online with your customers
Whether you depend on social media networks to interact with your customers or feature a chatbot on your site, it’s vital to interact with your customers online.
Make sure you reply to all their messages and email inquiries on social media platforms. Also, you should initiate interactions with your customers with these options:
- Send email newsletters to encourage users to reply with any questions or concerns they might have
- Encourage the users to share their favored product in the comment section, and then respond to them.
- Show followers your humanistic side.
- Run online contests and announce the winners on your social media platforms.
So, when you make yourselves available to your customers, they will feel more acquainted and comfortable with your brand.
5. Optimize existing content with local relevant keywords
Keyword targeting is important to both basic and local SEO.
Under a basic SEO campaign, you optimize the content for keywords that you want to rank higher in search results. In contrast, in local SEO, you optimize your website’s content for local keywords.
For example, the local keywords are like,
- Flower shop in downtown Johnstown
- Women’s clothing boutique in Austin
The above keywords are considered as local keywords since they feature a particular location.
When you optimize your site’s existing content with local keywords, the content can rank in search results when people look for the local terms you’ve included.
You might want to use such local keywords in title tags and meta descriptions for your page.
6. Don’t neglect the online reviews
According to a survey, 88% trust online reviews and feedback as much as a personal recommendation. This reflects the customer’s sayings about your business, and it really resonates with other potential customers.
Therefore, it’s important that you respond and monitor all your reviews, whether negative or positive.
Although it might be tough to respond to the reviews, you should remember some things when replying to reviews like – always provide them a way to contact you and keep in mind ‘the customer is always right’ mentality.
7. Use geofencing advertising
Geofencing is the crucial local SEO solution. It captures the attention of potential consumers that are physically near your location, and you can use it to snip customers from your competitors.
Anyone who owns a business can use geofencing advertising, as it especially works for local businesses. Here’s how geofencing works:
- Draw a virtual margin around your business
- When a customer enters, exits, or dwells within that boundary, they’re helped with ads for your company.
Therefore, geofencing is an excellent way to capture the customer’s attention that might not know your business exists.
You can also use geofencing advertising to beat your competition.
For example, let’s assume that a rival opened a restaurant down the street. So, you can place a geofence near their location to generate ads for your restaurant when customers pass by your rival’s restaurant.
Why Every Home-Based Business Requires Local SEO Solutions?
Choosing local SEO solutions can take your business to a higher level in different ways. Before we talk about it, let’s first see if you qualify as a local business or not.
A local business is:
- A corporate business with numerous locations.
- A brick and mortar enterprise that is locally owned
If your company comes into these categories, congratulations! You qualify as a local business, which means you can get benefits from local SEO solutions!
Significance of Local SEO Solutions for Local Businesses
Your local business needs local SEO solutions for the following reasons:
Without it, your customers can’t find you online, and will not have the opportunity to visit your store or buy your products.
Local SEO also allows your business to appear in Google results and in Google Maps so that you can reach your customers who are:
- Planning a tour of your area.
- Visiting your region from out of town.
- A resident of your city, but unaware of your business.
Ultimately, local SEO solutions help you reach more customers to grow your store.
Benefits of Local SEO Solutions
So we’ve helped you to see whether you qualify as a local business and let you in on the significance of local SEO solutions. Now it’s high time to tell you about the amazing benefits by opting for local SEO solutions.
1. You boost brand awareness
Opting for local SEO solutions will exponentially increase your brand awareness.
Local SEO helps your business take up valued real estate online such as Google Maps, Google search results, local listing websites, etc.
When you take up more space, you create extra opportunities for customers to find your business.
2. Stand out against your competitors
It might be possible that your competition uses local SEO solutions to reach customers, or they might have the same customers as you.
Therefore, you must keep up with your opponents by appearing in the same search results.
Ensure that you opt for local SEO and your listings are consistent and accurate across all platforms.
3. Control your audience
Using local SEO solutions gives you control over your target customers based near your location. When done properly, local SEO helps you reach the people near you, bring them into your store, and generate more sales.
3 Bonus Tips for Successful Local SEO Strategy
Check out our local SEO tips to create the best successful local strategy.
1. Make all your listings constant
Consistency is the key to a successful local SEO. Without it, you can confuse customers causing them to distrust your brand.
Be sure that you fix your name, phone number, address, website, and email address on all platforms. For example, your Google My Business account’s information should match listings in local directories and social media accounts.
2. Add location pages to your site
To make the most out of local SEO, take an extra initiative to create specific location pages on your website that target keywords like ‘bakery in Mount Joy.’
When you make such separate location pages, you increase the opportunity to rank higher in organic results on Google.
3. Encourage positive reviews
Customers are likely to purchase from you when you get positive reviews from happy and satisfied customers. You can integrate your star-reviews into Google My Business profile to showcase the way customers feel about your store, products, and services.
You can encourage pleased customers in many ways:
- Provide an email-receipt option and include its link to your review site.
- Provide a business visiting card at the register of your store, asking users to review your business for a discount on their purchases.
- Add a link to review your website in email newsletters to already subscribed to customers.
Looking for A One-Stop Shop for Local SEO Solution?
If you own a local business, keeping pace is difficult enough. If you want to see real results and take local SEO seriously, we recommend working with a local SEO company like JetRank.
Here’s a small tint of what we offer as a part of our local SEO services:
- Access to JetRank support representatives like Bing SMB, Google, Facebook, etc.
- Dedicated and professional local SEO expert.
- Meta and title optimization.
- Local keyword research and citation management.
- Quarterly GMB posts or SEO copy with locally-optimized terms.
- Monthly local SEO reports and reporting calls.
- Notifications for interactions across all profiles.
If you prefer managing your local SEO checklist on your own, JetRank offers client-managed local SEO solutions that allow you to directly link with your company’s local SEO solutions.
Whether you have someone to put efforts for your local SEO or want to have your hand in it, the JetRank Agency team is always available for help.
With a variety of certifications, we are one of the best-of-the-best agencies, and these certifications include Google Cloud Partnership, Google Premier Partnership, etc.
Each employee here is Google Analytics certified, which allows us to explain and pull custom local SEO reports to better understand your SEO campaign.
Also, we interpret your local SEO reports in a way that lets us improve your campaign, grow your business overall, and help you drive better results.
Moreover, if you run your own business, marketing is key, and we provide every marketing strategy under the sun.
We also offer the following services if you’re interested in going on along with your local business:
- SEO – Search engine optimization
- PPC – Pay-per-click advertising
- Video marketing
- Content marketing
- Competitor geofencing
- Amazon marketing
- Review management
- Web design and development
To get happening with local SEO or any other marketing strategies, we can’t wait to hear from you!
Feel free to call us or contact us online for more information!
