Making an impact on the World Wide Web can be daunting for small businesses. The initial instinct is often to appeal to the largest audience possible online. However, when your brick and mortar business is located in a provincial town, small businesses can benefit better from local SEO than an all-encompassing search strategy. Optimising local search listings can help small businesses increase their online presence with limited budget.
Optimise Locally
Small businesses can compete with big brands if they optimise locally. You can grow your brand online by taking a more targeted approach to SEO. Small businesses have better chance of gaining visibility in the organic search results if they target areas where competition is lower. This means targeting long tail key phrases relevant to the local area or areas where consumers are more likely to be interested in your products. For example, businesses selling farming equipment may want to optimise for local rural locations rather than urban city areas.
Geo-Specific Keywords
Small businesses competing in their local area, both on and offline need to optimise their website for local search. It makes sense to target people most likely to do business with you. Unless it is a big brand, people prefer to buy locally as businesses closer to home develop a sense of trust amongst locals who can recommend them. Perhaps your business can’t compete with the big brands for search terms like “wedding dress agency”, but “TOWN wedding dress agency” may be a better option for you. You can even narrow it down further and select phrases that target specific areas within your town.
Google Places
97% of consumers search for local businesses online even if they intend to purchase their products online too, so it makes sense to go local with your SEO strategy. If your business has a physical location, it is even more important to register with Google Places. Consumers will be searching for businesses around them on a map on their phone, which means they are more likely to convert. Additionally, it is easier for small businesses to rank higher on this type of online places compared to traditional local directory listings.
Mobile Ready
More and more people are searching on the go so it is important for small businesses to catch their customers when they are in the vicinity. You can make sure your business appears right when customers are ready to purchase by making your site locally optimised for mobile searchers.
Going Social
For small businesses it can be difficult to find the marketing budget to spread the word about their products. Embracing social media platforms can help your site perform better in the search engines when it comes to local listings. Often your address, a map and local friends will be shown, helping to increase consumer trust in your brand and products. It is a great platform for complementing your local SEO strategy.
James Raglan writes for a local SEO company in Leeds, UK
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Small businesses can certainly compete with big-named websites in Google if they optimize for local search. Local SEO can get you more targeted traffic from people in your area. This means more calls, walk-in traffic and sales.
Completely agree with everything above. The point of local discovery is increasingly moving online and SMB’s with a brick and mortar location need to adapt to this shift. We’ve done a lot of research into the local search/discovery space and, quite frankly, we’ve found that local search is broken. It is incredibly fragmented, with hundreds of different sites and apps that a potential customer can use to find a local business. While this is great for the consumer (increased search options naturally leads to an increased specificity of search), it creates all sorts of problems for the business and these directory sites. Business owners now need to monitor how they appear across multiple consumer touch points, not just how they appear in the Yellow Pages. As a result, businesses can’t take control of their information and Publishers (like Yahoo!, Yelp, or Facebook) don’t get accurate information. This in turn hurts the consumer, because they can’t access good, correct data. It’s a vicious cycle.
A local business really wants a platform which provides it facility of business promotion and if we talk about medium of promotion then there is no such fast medium like internet. It means just a little pay give us 2 benefits, first is promotion and other is our promoted presence over internet. According to my knowledge some affordable SEO Services in Canada currently works on 80% local projects.
Great content. I totally agree that businesses that focus on local SEO stand a better chance of ranking at the top. In fact, I’ve seen some local businesses get listed twice on the first page.
For those that get listed twice, the first link is the local one, which is usually at the very top. And the second link is lower down in the organic search results.
Thanks for such a well written article on SEO for local businesses. (I’ve shared it and bookmarked it as a resource for clients.) Targeting long tail key phrases that are relevant to the location of the business is great advice. This applies to PPC advertising as well. Some small business owners dismiss pay-per-click advertising as being prohibitive but well written targeted ads that only display within a specific geographic area can be very cost effective.
sherryl – Thanks for your feedback. Appreciate you sharing the article.
Harry
It is important to maximize your social media presence. To be able to deliver important news,reports on the local scene can help your company grow locally.
Rose
Thanks for the great article. We do website development and SEO consulting for small business websites, most of whom are catering to a local audience. It’s absolutely vital to optimize for your local market – both on the website, and offsite through social media, blogs, review sites, Google Places, etc. Our clients typically see an increase in traffic anywhere from 30-40% right away. We educate them in how to use social media and how to keep their content fresh so that Google consistently finds it interesting. We help them with a link building strategy and encourage them to get reviews and testimonials from their customers. In highly competitive fields (for instance, electrical contractors) every little bit helps.
Heather – Agree with you. Your clients can benefit great deal from your services. Thanks for your feedback.
Harry