Focus On Local SEO To Boost Your Business
Any business that serves a particular geographic range or has a physical location can benefit from local SEO. When someone performs a Google search for any combination of keywords that are relevant to your business, you want your website to show up near the top of the results. Otherwise, potential customers might not even know your company exists and you’ll lose business to competitors in the area. You can set your company apart by prioritizing local SEO. Understanding local SEO isn’t entirely complex, but there are many different layers to focus on. We’ve explained those layers for you here to effectively boost your business’s online visibility.
Differences Between SEO and PPC
A common question business owners have is whether their marketing strategy should be focused more on SEO (search engine optimization) or PPC (pay-per-click). Both SEO and PPC strategies can be effective when used for the right type of company and the right strategy is developed, but there are some distinct differences between the two to be aware of.
Focusing your marketing strategy on local SEO can provide many benefits. The goal of SEO is to boost organic traffic to your website. This happens when you optimize the content on your website to give it a better chance of showing up higher in the Google search results, which increases the likelihood of potential customers clicking on it. Focusing on SEO as a business strategy isn’t easy and isn’t cheap, but it has consistently been more cost-effective for companies compared to other strategies in the long run. Building a strong SEO strategy can mean your business has established organic results that should keep you near the top of the results as long as you maintain the strategy and continue improving your local SEO.
The PPC strategy offers some benefits as well. One of the most obvious benefits is having your website on the top of the search results. So even if a user scrolls past the first few results, they will still see your company name at the very least. The key difference between PPC and SEO is that PPC marketing is essentially investing in advertisements to boost your brand. PPC advertising may not seem expensive at first, but it can get costly if you use it as your primary marketing strategy. Many companies have experienced success with PPC marketing. However, maintaining that success over the long term usually proves to be challenging and not as effective as prioritizing SEO.
Understanding Google My Business
Every business needs to use Google My Business to boost visibility in search results. With Google My Business, users will see your URL, a description of your business, photos you upload, business hours, contact information, videos, relevant links, and more. Optimizing your Google My Business profile is critical. The information you fill out should be accurate, and you should provide all the information you can to help potential customers answer their questions about your company. Completeness will help your company show up higher in the local search results. Just be sure to check your profile page regularly to see if you have any requests for updates or other questions.
Local Citations Are Critical For Local SEO
Citations are an important component of a local SEO strategy, and they are necessary to help you show up in local search results. Google constantly tries to provide the best information and companies in search results, and citations play a big role in their algorithms. You want your company to be mentioned on websites other than your own to be more reputable and viewed as a legitimate business. And when Google trusts your company, it will show up higher on the search results list.
When it comes to listing citations, you can either submit your company information manually to listing sites, pay someone to do it, or work directly with services specializing in this type of work. The main thing to be aware of is the information has to be accurate and consistent across all listing sites. Otherwise, Google will question the accuracy of the information and might not look at your company as being legitimate.
Discover The Opportunities Created With Local Links
Your link-building strategy is another important layer to consider when building your local SEO. A good mix of on-page and off-page links can help you move up in the search results since Google likes to see this mixture. Links should be relevant and lead a user to the page they are looking for within your website. This means placing links from service pages to your blog pages and vice versa so users can quickly and easily find what they are looking for on your website.
Off-page links are also valuable to boost your reputation within the industry. Don’t hesitate to put links to other websites if the information from those websites boosts your credibility. It’s also a valuable strategy to reach out to other credible websites and ask if they could link back to your website. Google likes to see on-page and off-page links, so the more reputable ones you can include, the stronger your company will appear in its algorithms.
Don’t Forget Local SEO In Your Blog Content
Your blog SEO can build your local SEO strategy tremendously. One of the goals of your website should be to keep potential customers on your site as long as possible. Another goal is to create a website they can rely on to get the information they need so they’ll keep coming back. Your blog content is essential to achieving these goals.
Blogs should elaborate on your products or services, why your product is superior to others, and even provide relevant information in your industry that consumers could find valuable. Blog content should not focus primarily on promoting your specific products or services, though. Boosting your blog SEO means answering common questions customers have about what you offer and becoming a valuable resource to answer future questions they might have. The more your website becomes a trusted resource for useful information for customers, the longer they’ll stay on the website and continue coming back to it, and the better your local SEO will be.
A Local SEO Marketing Company Can Help
With so many different layers to focus on with local SEO, it can be overwhelming for a business owner to cover all bases. And when you have a solid local SEO strategy, you have to stay on top of it constantly to maintain its effectiveness. You could hire someone to your team specializing in SEO, but that isn’t always effective for businesses. Instead, you could turn to a local SEO marketing company to boost your efforts and handle the maintenance of your company website in the background.
Business owners have plenty of things on their plate to worry about, and focusing on local SEO often is placed on the backburner. This isn’t good for the viability or credibility of your website or company in general, so working with a local SEO marketing company is well worth it. The company can do everything from managing your content to even creating content for you. They can help you develop an effective marketing plan that includes prioritizing blog SEO, creating eBooks, press releases, articles, and other SEO website content. And they can do this while you focus on other things pertaining to the growth of your business.
WebNet Marketing Studio offers a wide range of digital marketing services. Whether you’re a brand new company looking to establish an online image or if you’re an established company that needs to boost its local SEO, we are here to help. We have a simple process to help companies boost their marketing efforts, but we also tailor our services to meet your specific and unique needs. You have plenty of things to focus on as a business owner, so let us handle some of the back-end work to promote and market your company. SEO is a driving force of increasing your company’s visibility, so contact us today to see how we can have your brand listed higher in the search results and drive more traffic to your website as a result.
