Now more than ever, having a great website can make or break your business. Your website gives you the opportunity to target the entire online world, promoting your content and products to customers from all walks of life. Some businesses, though, almost exclusively do business with people in their town, county, or city. If you are one of those kinds of small businesses, you’ll want to make sure you optimize your website for Local SEO. In this post, we explain what Local SEO is and why it is important for small business owners these days.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO means optimizing your website for geographically-oriented search queries, like [coffee shop near me] or [florist in Pittsburgh], for example. Optimizing for Local SEO looks a little different than the Holistic SEO approach for businesses with larger reach. Your strategy will focus more on making your business findable in Google Maps and ranking in those local queries, instead of writing content that can rank globally and reach people halfway around the world.
If you have a small business that primarily serves customers in your local area or if people visit your storefront frequently, you should definitely invest in Local SEO.
More information on Local SEO
On our blog, we’ve written several posts about the different aspects of Local SEO you should consider when optimizing your website for a geographical area:
- What Is NAP Information And Why Is It Important
- Where And How To Get Reviews For Your Business
- How Reviews And Ratings Can Influence Your Website’s SEO
- Using Foursquare To Promote Your Local Business
- How To Optimize Your Google My Business Listing
- Organic SEO Versus PPC Advertising
If you are serious about optimizing for your local audience, we recommend taking the time to read through these. They’ll help you improve every aspect of your site’s Local SEO.
Local SEO happens offline too!
Optimizing for Local SEO doesn’t end online. You can also help make your business findable through word-of-mouth marketing and print brochures. So don’t forget about investing time there! Put your website and social media on your business cards, brochures, and other promotional items. You just might see your likes or follows increase. And you may even see traffic come in to your website!
Optimize for local rankings
A Local SEO strategy takes into account a variety of factors – like relevance, prominence, and distance – to help you rank in geo-targeted search results. This helps Google know what kind of business you have, where it is, when it is opened, and so on. If you give Google all these details the right way, you can beat your competition in the search results and attract new customers.
All the work that goes into creating and optimizing a website for your business can be overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be. Need a little help with your website’s Local SEO? Contact us here at MotorClick! Our experts will partner with you to build and optimize an awesome site that fits your needs and budget, so you can grow your business without breaking the bank.
Keep Reading: Optimizing Your Homepage For SEO