Popular Local SEO Strategies to Increase Business Visibility

Rhett Lloyd
Apr 04, 2022
8 mins

Local SEO strategy in Fort Pierce, Fl

If you’re a business owner trying to expand the reach of their business, then you must be in search of new and innovative ways of increasing the visibility of your business in the local as well as global market. A significant percentage of the total population relies heavily on the internet to discover new and relevant businesses that fulfill their needs and requirements. The best practice for new business owners is to take advantage of this and increase the chances of their website being discovered by online viewers. 

By properly utilizing certain local SEO strategies, you can significantly boost the amount of organic traffic that your website or business receives regularly. Additionally, you can also ensure that the audience you receive is relevant to the products or services that your business provides. This will ensure the least possibility of questions or queries from potential customers that would be ready to buy from your business. Therefore, if you wish to expand the reach of your business in a short period of time to gradually grow your business, then you need to be aware of certain local SEO strategies that can assist you with this purpose. 

With that said, let’s not waste any more time and get straight into the guide. 

8 Most Effective Local SEO Strategies for Small Businesses 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complex skill that may take months to master; however, you don’t need to worry because we’ve come for your assistance. To make the process much more convenient for you, we’ve assembled the most effective strategies that would help you achieve the best standards of SEO for your business’s website. 

Be sure to go through each of the local SEO strategies listed below and practice them to get the most out of your site’s SEO. 

1. Utilize Local Citations

If you’ve ever tried searching for a business on Google or any other search engine, you might be aware of what local citations are. Local citations refer to details of your business, including its physical address, name, phone number, and others. These local citations can be uploaded of various different locations, including search engines, business directories, review sites such as Yelp, and more. 

So how can local citations benefit your site’s SEO? A business with no local citations is unlikely to rank on search engines for relevant keywords. By increasing the number of places that Google can discover your business, you can significantly increase the relevancy and reliability of your website as well as your business. This results in Google promoting your business over other competitor sites with a lower number of local citations. Therefore, making use of local citation can not only increase the flow of traffic to your website but also help you get ahead of your competition in the local as well as global market. 

Another benefit of local citations is that it allows Google to know exactly what your business is and what sort of services you provide. As a result, your business can be promoted to the right audience that is likely to find interest in what your business is offering. Apart from greater traffic, you would also benefit from the relevant audience that is ready to buy from your business. 

2. Optimize Google My Business (GMB)

Google My Business (GMB) is a crucial tool that allows businesses to be discovered by their targeted audiences. The official GMB tool is completely free to use for business and it can benefit your small business in numerous different ways. While setting up GMB for your business, you are required to enter relevant details about your business, including name, phone number, location, directions on Google Maps, to help potential customers reach your business and fulfill their needs. 

By setting up your GMB account, you’ll be able to connect with your audience, post updates regarding your business, and carefully monitor how customers and potential customers interact with your business. When optimizing GMB for your business, you are suggested to enter as much relevant and accurate information as you can since Google ranks these businesses based on their accuracy and completeness. GMB is also responsible for providing information to Google Maps and Google Local 3-Pack, which is a list of the three local businesses that rank highest for the searched keyword. 

While Google My Business isn’t the only factor that would improve your business’s Google SERP ranking, it would certainly give your site’s SEO a prominent boost, resulting in more potential customers being able to discover and benefit from your business. 

3. Become Aware of Local SEO Factors

If you wish to rank high in the Google SERP, then you need to be aware of certain factors that are responsible for determining the quality and effectiveness of your website’s SEO. Local SEO factors are slightly different from regular SEO and must be considered to improve your site’s local search rankings. As you might’ve guessed, the four most important SEO ranking factors include direct website visits, time spent on the website, pages visited per session, and bounce rate. 

Whether or not these factors are being fulfilled is determined by a series of signals that are produced by the Google algorithm. 

  • Link Signals: The number and quality of links to your website. 
  • On-Page Signals: Relates to the keywords that are included in your website content. 
  • Behavioral Signals: Depends on the behavior of viewers, including click-through rates, mobile clicks, check-ins, and more. 
  • Google My Business Signals: Used to set up your local business through Google Maps by GMB.
  • Citation Signals: Depend on the consistency of NAP data across citations as well as the total number of citations.
  • Personalization: Based on customer’s language, location, preferences, and more. 
  • Review Signals: The number of reviews that your business has received. 
  • Social Media Signals: The number of likes, comments, and shares that your business has acquired over social media channels. 

4. Develop Local Backlinks

Another pretty effective strategy for improving your site’s local SEO is performing local link building for your website. By building a network of links that connect to your business, you can drive traffic from multiple different sources to your website. If you own a small-scale business, then link building can do wonders for your business. You can request other relevant businesses, local papers, and community groups to provide backlinks for your business. 

When choosing the right website for link building, you need to ensure that the business or website is relevant to the services that your business offers. This ensures that the flow of traffic to your website is relevant to your business, which eventually results in a greater number of potential customers. 

5. Perform Keyword Research

If you’ve been involved in the world of SEO for a while, you must know the importance of keywords for the search rankings of your website. Your use of keywords is crucial in determining the success of your site’s SEO. You must perform extensive keyword research to discover the most popular keywords that are relevant to your business. For this research, you can use popular search engines, such as Google, or closely analyze the content of other similar businesses to extract the most used keywords. 

Once you’ve performed the necessary keyword research, you need to include these keywords in the content of your website. While doing so, you need to avoid keyword stuffing, which refers to the overuse of keywords in content. Don’t include keywords where they are unnecessary or don’t make sense with the context. 

6. Improve Metadata 

Metadata is the short text that online viewers see under website links in search results. This text provides relevant data and information regarding a blog post or a web page. The length and quality of this metadata are also considered while determining the effectiveness of your site’s SEO. 

The ideal length of a meta description is believed to be 160 characters; however, it can be up to 725 characters. The description must accurately convey what the web page contains. Meta descriptions should be brief and to the point, with slight use of keywords, if possible. 

7. Improve Customer Experience

We can’t emphasize enough the fact that the quality of customer experience is directly related to the success of your site’s local SEO. You need to minimize the loading times of your website to avoid the viewer facing any inconvenience. The products or services that your business provides should uphold quality and standard that satisfies the customers. You should also provide good customer service to provide the necessary assistance to your customers at any point. 

By taking all these measures to improve the customer experience, you can increase the number of positive reviews that your business receives. With a greater number of positive online reviews, Google is likely to promote your business over other competitors; therefore, greatly boosting your site’s search rankings. 

Increasing the visibility of your business is a slow and gradual process that may take several months to display results. Therefore, all you need to do is play your cards right and patiently wait for the expected results to appear. By following the SEO strategies listed above, you can significantly increase your business visibility in a short period of time. 

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