3 Easy Tips for Mastering Local SEO
90% of consumers have used the internet to find a business in their local area (BrightLocal), if your business isn’t showing up, you’re missing out on 90% of your business.
Local SEO is one of the most important marketing tactics, but is often overlooked. Here are 3 ways to ensure your local SEO is working for you!
Yoast defines local SEO as, “optimizing your website for a specific local area”. More and more people are relying on local Google search to find information on local businesses. In order to drive more business to your company, it is important to optimize your SEO for:
- Relevancy in your market
- Visibility with potential customers
There are multiple ways to optimize for local SEO, so we’ve put together some of our recommendations and tips that work best to help you begin to incorporate local SEO optimization into your strategy.
Some of the simple ways to go about optimizing for local SEO include claiming your business’ listing, making sure your business’ information appears correctly, managing online reviews, and engaging with customers on social media.
Increasing use of voice search.
As many as 75% of people who owned smart speakers used those devices to perform local searches (BrightLocal).
People are now able to search anything on their phones and smart speakers using the voice search tool. With voice search becoming more accurate, it will only become more popular. But what does it have to do with local SEO?
Voice search keywords and queries are different from traditional internet searches as voice searches are longer – making it important to optimize for long-tail keywords that would be spoken out loud. To do this, we recommend creating content that is more natural sounding so that Google will likely pick your content to show people asking specific questions. It may be helpful to create content answering questions beginning with “who, what, where, when, why, and how”, as the majority of voice searches begin with these.
Online reviews matter.
82% of consumers read online reviews for businesses during a local search (BrightLocal).
An average consumer spends 13 minutes and 45 seconds reading online reviews before ultimately making a decision (BrightLocal).
Did you know that Google and other search engines use reviews as a part of how they rank search results? According to the BrightLocal survey, consumers trust online reviews more than any other kind of information on the internet because they count as personal referrals. A survey by Podium showed that “the minimum star rating of a business consumers would consider engaging with is a 3.3.”
How does this impact local SEO?
It is helpful to build a system to collect, manage and display reviews online. The quality and quantity of your reviews can affect your search position as well as affect your sales because they establish credibility and trust. With people relying on reviews more and more, it is important to invest time into this area of your business and create a strategy.
Create and share local content.
When creating content for local SEO, you should focus on hyperlocal topics that are specific and relevant to your area and buyers. This includes sharing local events and incorporating how your business relates. Larger businesses may not think these events are worth covering, but it can help a small business really stand out. By discussing your business’ history and roots, you are building a meaningful relationship with your buyers and engaging with the local community. Another option is to interview customers and cover their success stories with your product or service instead of just writing about their benefits. These will increase your rank position in local searches bringing you more traffic.
Local SEO can seem intimidating, but with a good strategy and patience, you can become an expert and get your business’ name into the community. SEO can be tricky as one thing will work one week and the next, maybe not. However, you should still be consistent and stick with it as SEO will always be important.
RenderTribe is here to help with years of SEO experience to share. Our RenderLab process identifies the unique pieces that fit in your overall marketing strategy and aligns your plan with overall business objectives. We help build the foundation for measurement, expertise, and the tactical execution needed to support the plan.
Let us help you grow your bottom line. Contact us today.
