A guide to optimising Local SEO Services for Small Businesses 2024

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the fastest-growing marketing tool currently available at the moment, expanding at twice the rate of paid search and it actually works!

If you are not optimizing your site for organic traffic, you can guarantee that your competitors will be, putting your business in the back of the queue for leads, sales, and revenue. You need a trusted SEO company to put your brand in front of the right people at the right time.  This is where Silicon Technix can help you. Using SEO, we will help your company to build long-term campaigns that will help elevate your company’s name and brand.

Local SEO also known as Map SEO, is the division of SEO that helps small and medium-sized businesses to grow. Its uniqueness in SEO has gained its reputation in recent years. Whilst national SEO focuses more on ranking in searches across the country, local SEO Services prioritize appearing on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) in specific locations. This strategy relies on marketing your brand, products, and services to local leads and customers.  Since 46% of all Google searches are local searches. Even when someone performs a typical search, the chances that Google shows local businesses nearby remain high.

Local SEO Services like Google are continuously updating their algorithms (Page Rankings) to provide consumers with useful search results. It is important to understand how these systems work to ensure that your business is being shown to the right people who are looking for the right things.

Using search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing are all essential tools for local SEO Services. So ensure that your business features on all three search engines and that you are using up-to-date contact information, physical address information, operation hours, and photos on your accounts. Those used to source the local businesses are often displayed complete with contact information and a map at the top of Google searches.

Better Conversion rates when using local SEO!

One key benefit of local SEO is that it brings potential customers to your website and improves the conversion rate. Statics show that 28% of the local searches result in sales. By presenting yourself as an expert in your region when local clients are ready to buy, can increase the odds of becoming the reason for them to buy. Most local searchers prefer to go with local businesses rather than searching for companies miles away or making a random purchase online.

Create a Google My Business Account

Optimising your Google listing (Business Profile) is the most effective way to rank higher on Google Maps as well as gain visibility in Google Search local results. In order to gain access to your Business Profile to make these optimizations, you need a Google My Business account associated with that profile. Once you provide all of the requested information in your Google My Business account dashboard, all the information will be added to your Business Profile, which appears in Google Search local results, the Google Search Knowledge Panel, and Google Maps.

Using ‘backlinking’ to local events sites, and location-specific phrases in keywords can help you gain a bigger mark based on your region. So when visitors close by to your business browse for your services or products, this will increase your ranking position and will lead to more traffic to your store.

Get Regular reviews from your customers

Get your customers to write glowing reviews for your business. This not only helps to optimize your ‘Google My Business presence, but it also encourages more local customers to buy from you.

Yahoo listing – Local works is a listing Management Tool for small businesses. It is a service that lets you submit your business listing information to multiple directories across the Internet from one place, identify listing errors, edit listing information, track your listing performance and status, and see key business reputation information (ratings and reviews).

Bing Listing – Microsoft Bing (formerly known as Bing) is a web search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service has its origins in Microsoft’s previous search engines: MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and later Live Search. Bing provides a variety of search services, including web, video, image, and map search products.

Google Maps – Now that Google Maps has had a makeover, this has brought optimized Google pages back into the spotlight again. The viewer has the option to find business results within a Google Maps search via ‘Top reviewers’ and ‘Your circles. Clicking the option ‘Top reviewers’ gives you places that have been reviewed by experts on Google Business, whilst the option ‘Your circles’ shows places that are recommended by people in your area.

How Local SEO Services can help your business using Google Maps?

To help you rank higher on Google Local Search via Google Maps, try to do as many of the following as possible:

  1. Get regular reviews from your customers.
  2. Complete your Google My Business Local profile.
  3. Use photos of the place of the business section.
  4. Use accurate details for directions.

Home Page/Custom Landing Page

Having a customised landing page or home page will help rank your business better, whichever your Google My Business is linked to. The on-page Local SEO Services elements and linking profile of this landing page or home page partially decide how well you rank in local Google.

Make sure that you have a good number of in-bound links pointing to your page from locally relevant pages, such as local forums, local review sites, local business listing sites are included on this page. Add a blog section as well using original content and location-based keywords.

Social Media

For local businesses, Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google My Business, and YouTube play a big role in their local search ranking as they provide a wide array of opportunities for positive brand exposure to your local audiences.

  1. Try to gain as many likes on your Social Media platform pages as possible. Running local competitions, running promotions or advertise as much as possible are all ways to gain these extra likes.
  2. Encourage content shares as much as possible. Local or national competitions and promotions can encourage this.
  3. Have inbound links pointing to your site from discussions on local community forums.
  4. Use product or service-related keywords in your brand-page title or description.
  5. Use location-based keywords in your brand page title or description.

Optimise for Voice Search

Statically, 71% of people prefer to search for items using voice search rather than tying. As voice search grows more popular in these upcoming years, it is important that your website is optimized for this type of search. Voice search optimisation aims to optimise your page to answer the questions people are asking when carrying out verbal searches. This process allows your website and specific pages on your website to be read by the voice search device (Alexa, Siri, Google Chrome) whenever the user asks for information relating to your products and services.

In local SEO, it is important to optimise this for how people ask questions when speaking into devices, as opposed to how they type out their searches. Generally, consumers use more long-tailed keywords when doing voice searches compared with normal searches. As a result of this, you will have to adjust the local SEO Services of your content to fit the more conversational tone of someone speaking. For example, you will want to account for the traditional question starters (who, what, when, where, why, and how).

Tips to make your website more ‘voice-search friendly!

  1. Since more people are using voice search on their mobile devices, make sure your website is mobile-friendly. It is important that your website is responsive and easy to navigate on smaller screens.
  2. Voice search is particularly good at answering particular questions, so use long-tail keywords to help you target those queries.
  3. Often results can be inaccurate. To avoid this, make sure your website’s content is accurate and current.
  4. Set up a FAQ section on your website as this would provide an immediate and short description as the answer to their question.
  5. Make sure that your website loads fast.

Optimise Your Website for Mobile

Over the past few years, mobile visits to websites have rapidly increased compared to those viewed through Desktops. This means by ensuring your website is optimised for mobiles and tablets will help become a higher contender in local SEO Services.

By following this list of local SEO Services ranking factors, will help your local business rank higher in Google local. You need to remember that improving your Google local ranking is a process that has to be constantly worked on; it’s not just a one-time thing. Improving some of these ranking factors may take a good amount of time and effort but they are definitely worth considering.

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