The Best Local SEO tips for Small Businesses

Want to reach more potential customers as a local business? You don't need advertising agencies and a big budget to achieve that. We'll show you some effective tips and tactics that can be implemented to have an impact on your organic rankings. Here's how to promote your business for free.

Hyper-local content marketing targets customers in a very specific area which usually has geographic restrictions. In plain English, this type of marketing allows you to get visibility and clients around your physical locations. If a potential customer is on a mobile phone performing a "near me" type of search, it's in your interest to show up. We often look for things around us like ATMs, nearby grocery areas, nearby hotels, or nearby places of interest when we visit a new place. Most people expect Google Map to automatically take their respective locations into account when showing results. 

• The place from which the person performs their search
• NAP
• The presence of a Google My Business listing
• Keywords used in the Google My Business profile
• Keywords used in online reviews
• Actions on the media social
• Inbound links with a local dimension
• The stars assigned to this company in Google My Business

You need to be coherent on the web to get online business visibility. Check your company's NAP (name, address and telephone). "NAP" means name, address and telephone number. Your business's NAP should exactly match the one on your location page, Google My Business profile, and other quotes. The exact match turns out to be quite important. Remove any duplicate listing you find to help Google hone in. 

We will give a little reminder: companies that meet an urgent need, such as plumbers, exterminators or locksmiths, must make their phone number one of the most visible and eye-catching elements of their website, because it is the information that panicked visitors want to find immediately.

Photos are important for your city pages (pages that show off your business locations) and business listings. This is a portion of the SEO strategy many folks neglect. By having multiple photos of your business on your listing, you'll be able to better engage with a user when they're looking for a business to visit. Almost all cell phones on the market are equipped with a high quality camera. So it should be easy to take high quality photos of your business or services for your GMB profile.

Show the Interior of your brick-and-mortar business : it's an asset!

photos Interior photos are often missing from company files. They help customers get a realistic idea of ​​what to expect in your business. In the case of healthcare facilities, beautiful interior photos can be a deciding factor.

Exterior photos boost your marketing efforts as well

The inclusion of exterior photos is very important for the optimization of local pages. Your exterior photos must include:

• Signage and logos.
• Parking (if applicable).
• Nearby businesses (if they are inside a mall or linear mall).

Exterior photos are meant to help new visitors find your business the first time they arrive and can be a deciding factor for new businesses as well.

Optimize the metadata of your images

Your images should be of high quality. However, those taken with a modern camera tend to have large file sizes. Software like ImageExifEditor can be used to add metadata to images, such as title, description, and even GPS coordinates. ShortPixel can be used to compress images. 

Satisfied customers often don't tend to leave reviews. But positive reviews and testimonials go a long way when it comes to SEO rankings. The quantity, quality and speed of online reviews is more important than ever to stand out in the Google Local Pack and Google Maps. Do not fear a bad review, Google has stated that customers trust a mix of positive and negative reviews to make their choice. To increase the number of reviews, you can offer incentives to your customers. 

How to ensure you have optimized reviews

Ask your customers exactly what you want to see in a review. We are asked to explain what they had as services with our agency, the city and what they liked. Like that, we have opinions with key words related to our services, our city and a sincere testimony.

Put a link everywhere to request a notice

• cash register receipts
• invoices
• signature email business
• cards
• sign in store
• signs in store, etc.

The most important thing is to keep asking and never let the fear of negative feedback stop you.

Responding to Reviews Left Online

One of the things that makes a customer more likely to leave you a review is seeing your responses to other reviewers. Make sure you respond to all reviews if you have time, and if you don't have time, focus on reviews that ask questions or leave a lot of detail. Take into account the effort the customer has made to leave the review and try to match it in your response.

To go further: as an entrepreneur, you must remember that you cannot rely solely on Google reviews. You have to use other local platforms like Yelp, Foursquare, local directories, etc.

Answering questions with Google Q&A

Google Q&A is a little known but very useful feature. It offers companies another opportunity to engage in dialogue with their customers. Don't just sit around and wait for people to ask or encourage them to ask questions about your business. The trick is to use the Q&A yourself, asking and answering the most common questions, to create a sort of offsite FAQ for your business.

Links that come from other websites impact your online visibility. To improve your business positioning for "near me" searches, you need to acquire relevant, high authority inbound links with geographic anchor text.

For example, if you want to rank for "near me" searches "you should use location-rich anchor text variations like"Montreal's Best SEO Agency"," Montreal SEO Experts "," Wellington Web Agency "," Verdun SEO Agency ","Montreal SEO Training”, Etc. 

Check that you have the correct Google My Business primary category

You may have chosen a primary and secondary business category when you created your Google My Business. revisit and update them if necessary, for better relevance in local searches Local

Give your meta titles and meta descriptions a more local flavor

Here are some guidelines and ideas to help you get started with your local SEO. These will help you write some unique and relevant content. You shouldn't have to provide a zip code to project that local business vibe. If you are a store, what are some top brands that someone might be looking for near you? What makes this store / business unique compared to your competitors in the area?

A well-optimized meta title should have three basic elements:

• Brand name
• Geospecific keyword (city or local area)
• Target keywords

Meta Description

Make sure to include the same three elements as in the title while adding additional additional selling points. Use these additional elements to help you establish your added value in the eyes of visitors.

Your local content should be relevant and useful. Every piece of content should have a purpose on your website. We advise you to put all the relevant information and contact details in the footer, so that they appear on every page. Here are some types of content that will help you optimize your local SEO.

Store card: Each store should have its own card. 

Integrated Map Integrating

a map can help users determine more precisely whether your location is the one closest to them. If possible, use the Google Maps API to develop a custom mapping solution to include your other nearby stores.

Directions

You need to help users find your business, Mention major highways, major intersections, etc. close to your store.

Don't forget to mention nearby businesses in your directions. It can help users find your business if it is located in a shopping mall or mall.

Home page city or region region

Can you position yourself on local keywords without a location web page? It is much easier to rank in the local SERPs if you have a locator web page. If you are a local business with multiple stores, you should create a separate page for each site. If you're a small, local business, just create a page that lists at least all of your stores. Ideally you need one page per store.

If creating multiple city-specific location pages seems like a daunting task, start with the city or region.

FAQ Pages FAQ Pages

are one step away from becoming my one stop shop for all things local SEO content.

With voice search changing the way people search, the industry is seeing a change in the way people consume content. Almost a third of searches done on cell phones relate to places. This is why FAQ pages can help you improve your local SEO.

Specials

Specials and discounts are the crème de la crème for local business owners. Give your customers what they want by personalizing special offers for local residents. By offering a location-specific discount, you attract your local audience. You give them a sense of uniqueness.

Hosting Local Events

If you host a local event without announcing it on your website, you are losing a good deal of your SEO power. If organizing events isn't your cup of tea, there are other options. You can also consider partnering with a local event. The most high-quality backlinks some of our clients have received have come from local referrals. If you don't have the budget to sponsor local events, then talk about local events.

So spend a small budget on sponsoring local sports teams and events, as well as volunteering in charities, and ask them to provide you with a link to your site. Genuinely caring about your local community is the best thing you can do for your business website link profile as it will improve your organic and local rankings.

Blog Content

If you are a local business, having an active blog will help you improve your ranking in Google. One of the things that work really well on local business blogs is the Best Of guides. With a "best of" list, you want to build a guide that gives your readers everything they love about a topic.

Press pages

Press pages are an opportunity to integrate local content. Now is the time to spotlight local posts that have spoken to you. Start creating local content now. Content is crucial if you want people to find your local business online and visit you in IRL.

Building backlinks is hard work. Internal links are much easier to build and they send a strong message to search engines. There are several ways to add relevant internal links to your local pages. You can try some ideas from this list:

• If your site offers specific services, link to information pages about those services.
• Link to social media profiles specific to your location.
• For medical clinics, link to doctor profiles.
• For restaurants, a link to the menus.
• Link to your business information page.
• Recently published blogs.

This is more of a "nice to have" item. There's an entire category of Schema dedicated to local businesses. The schema language enables you to highlight certain elements in the code of the page. 

What is the "local business" rich snippet?

You can highlight your content directly in search engine results with rich snippets. You are advised to review the options available for generic local businesses, schools, restaurants, etc. 

• Official documentation for restaurants
• Technical instructions for training
• Practical sheet for local businesses
• Enriched extract for events

And the FAQ option?

Businesses that use a “rich snippet,” the FAQ markup, will have the opportunity to answer questions and generate interest in organic results. This tactic allows you to take up a lot more space in Google and push the results of competitors lower because FAQs take up more space. It is relatively easy to add this functionality in WordPress with SEO Press Pro or by having a developer do it for you.