Whether you own a restaurant, a hair salon, or any other local business. None of them can be successful if you are not dedicated to it.
Not to mention many of you might already have established as a well-known business in their respective local area.
However, if you are not optimizing the latest promotional and marketing strategies available at your fingertips.
Trust me, you are losing a ton of possible customers each day, and your smart competitors may be benefiting from them without much effort.
Expanding their business and customer reach every day, you can do the same and boost the number of your customers two times more than you normally receive.
How SEO works for small businesses? Definitive guide!
A little bit of help from the online platforms can help you achieve this goal.
but without enough fundamental knowledge about digital marketing and promoting your product/services via online mediums you won’t produce any results.
In this definitive guide, we’re going to discuss SEO and how to use it. That can convert your efforts into profit!
Assuming that you already have a site/blog related to your business up and running, let’s get started!
What is SEO?
As a complete beginner, you may not have complete information regarding SEO so first understand what SEO means.
It’s a step-by-step procedure that optimizes your blog’s content and other elements for performing better than competitors.
As the name suggests SEO is a process that utilizes the optimization of various elements of the blog, in a way that different search engines can scan, index, and rank your content much faster compared to others.
Without proper SEO, not a single blog can withstand the current competition in the market.
So it’s obvious that every single blogger around the globe will give their best to outperform others when it comes to implementing better SEO.
But what about the local businessmen who don’t have enough technical knowledge to tackle such problems?
Why SEO is different for local businesses?
SEO for local and small businesses is performed with a different approach to get concentrated results in less time.
It’s not the same SEO strategies that are used for huge companies and international businesses.
Because when it comes to growing a local level business the circumstances are different.
As the owner needs to target a very concentrated audience with specific interests, local SEO differs from the normal SEO.
You can say that it’s a way to drive more traffic to your online store and attract more customers without wasting on costly marketing and advertisements.
How to use SEO tools for better and faster results?
No doubt the basic terms are the same for local and normal SEO.
However, the methods and processes used to improve these SEO-related scores differ when you are targeting a local business instead.
And the best way to grow your local business quickly and drive more potential customers from the internet is by improving your SEO.
SEO Tools
To make the process easier there are tools available in the market that are made to guide you throughout the process while working on the SEO of your blog.
Don’t get overwhelmed by the number of SEO tools you have at your disposal, because without enough knowledge you can not possibly use them to their highest potential.
If you have already started generating regular income from your store/business investing in better SEO tools can help you speed up the process.
Don’t bother to go for the paid tools, if you are short on budget. Instead, the best option would be to choose the free alternatives and start improving your overall SEO.
How to use them?
After choosing a decent SEO tool you should get to know the basic features that are used for increasing your traffic.
If you want to promote your products and services much faster and cheaper compared to other methods then,
Here are some common SEO terms and how you can use SEO tools to optimize them.
1. Build quality backlinks
One of the essential elements for attracting more organic search traffic and stand out from others.
Building quality backlinks for your business site can benefit you drastically.
Whether it’s increasing the authority of your domain, getting your content index much faster, or attracting more organic visitors.
If you succeed in building quality backlinks related to your business type, you can turn the tables for sure!
And SEO tools like SemRush or RavenTools can help you get this done easily.
As you get customized features with detailed metrics required for building quality backlinks, it won’t be a problem to grab those with such powerful tools.
2. On-page SEO
Something you should never miss to use for your site, As on-page SEO is free to implement.
Implementing proper on-page SEO requires enough knowledge and decent writing skills. So if you aren’t having a hard time writing content for your site.
It may be easy for you to perform better on-page SEO with decent writing skills.
Or else you can simply hire a content writer for your site who knows how to create quality content with proper on-page SEO.
Because without enough on-page SEO your content won’t perform well compared to others in the market.
3. Writing appropriate content
Appropriate content in the terms of better readability while following proper SEO guidelines. It should be user-friendly and easy to scan for your readers.
Because quality content is the first requirement for making your local business successful.
The majority of the new visitors need some descriptive and catchy content to convert them into your future customers.
Suppose you run a bakery, and you have recently started reaching out to others via your online site.
In case an interested person visits your site and doesn’t find enough information or support required to order something/contact you further, you will lose the customer for sure.
Such situations can be avoided by deploying a high-quality landing page on your business site.
A landing page is a type of all-in-one article with everything included, that serves as the home page of your site.
so wherever a new customer visits your site for the first time they can decide whether to choose your service/product or not.
4. Using social media platforms
Social media platforms are very popular when it comes to targeting a local audience and driving more customers.
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and even Twitter all have enough potential to grow your local business if used properly.
In terms of SEO using social media platforms can improve your overall SEO as they conduct social signals when a lot of people get redirected to your site from your social media handles.
But it’s not possible if you are not willing to regularly post informative and useful posts on your social media.
So it would be better to focus on one or two social media platforms at a time.
5. Following the mobile-first index
The latest update from Google has made it mandatory for all sites to publish a perfect mobile version of their sites.
As the mobile-first index algorithm only crawls the mobile version of any site that intends to get indexed.
So if you have not updated your site and content to be mobile friendly you may face a lot of problems while promoting your local business for sure.
Because any desktop sites and their content won’t get indexed by the Google crawlers after the update.
Don’t worry if you have no idea how to make your site mobile-friendly and compatible with the mobile-first index, go through this step-by-step guide.
6. Make your visitors come back!
Another great practice that you should implement is to convert your first-time visitors into returning visitors.
In this way, you can build a customer base that is defined to benefit your business at the end of the month.
But how can you keep them close to you and your business? There are many ways to make them visit your site often.
And email marketing is one of the most popular and widely used methods. In which you will make the new visitors share their email addresses in exchange for something.
It can be anything from a free e-book, a cheat sheet, a discount coupon, anything you can manage to provide for free.
Once you have collected enough emails, you can use email marketing software like Aweber. To automate the promotion part of the process and grow your local business with increased sales and conversions.
Wrapping up
Performing SEO for a local business may sound easy. But if you are facing too much competition in your area.
Then the SEO part can take some time to work and show results. No doubt you will get a lot more customers after you are available on the internet.
But you will have to keep providing the best quality products/services if you are looking forward to a long-term return on investment from this process.
Do share this article with others if you found anything useful, and don’t forget to mention any suggestions or queries you have in the comments section below.