If you're in business, it's important to be visible to your customers. But if you do business locally, it's even more crucial: People need to be able to find your physical location before they can make a purchase.
Fortunately, the professional SEO Brisbane Services company expert team suggests several ways for brick-and-mortar businesses like yours to increase foot traffic through effective local SEO strategies. Here are some of the most effective strategies for boosting your business with local SEO:
- Analyse your local citations.
Local citations are a crucial part of the local SEO process. They're essentially linked to your business, and they help you rank higher in search engines.
There are many types of local citations out there, but this guide will focus on three:
- Local directories (Yelp, Google My Business)
- White-labelled sites
- Directories with an editorial review process (DMOZ etc.)
- Claim your Google My Business listing.
Claiming your Google My Business listing is an easy way to expand your local SEO strategy. This free service allows you to add photos, videos, and a link to your website from within the Google My Business dashboard. You can also use this as an opportunity to tell people about special offers or promotions that are exclusive to customers who visit you in person. Here's how it works:
- Log into your account at mybusiness.google.com (if you don't already have one, create one)
- Click on "Add a business" in the top right corner of the screen.
- Enter all pertinent information about your business, including name, address, phone number and hours of operation (it will take some time for this information to be verified). Don't forget about any seasonal specials or deals that might help attract more customers!
- Now that your business has a presence online through Google's search engine results pages (SERPs), it's time to focus on content creation so people interested in finding out more about what makes them different from other businesses nearby while they're searching around town looking for answers—and hopefully choosing yours instead!
- Refine your web pages.
There are several ways to improve your website's ranking.
First, you need to make sure that your pages are mobile-friendly and easily navigable for users on the go.
Second, make sure that there aren't any dead links on your site—these may show up in the search results as broken links, hurting your business's credibility in the eyes of potential customers.
Lastly, ensure that all of your pages are optimised for search engines by checking whether they have unique content and images.
- Ask for reviews.
You should have a link to your Google My Business page on every page of your site. This will help users find you when they search for products or services related to your business, and it's important that this information is accurate and up-to-date.
In addition, updating the information on your GMB profile regularly can also help improve its ranking in local search results.
However, if you feel like there are some key details missing from the profile and want to get more people to see it in their searches, then adding reviews is a great way to boost local SEO!
Reviews will appear next to listings within maps results pages when people search locally, but only if they include specific keywords in those listings (read more about how reviews work).
Asking for good reviews from happy customers will increase the chances that Google finds them before someone else's listings—and since review stars are factored into rankings as well as clickthrough rates (CTR), asking for them also improves visibility in organic results too!
- Cultivate backlinks.
Backlinks are links that point to your website from another site. When websites link to yours, it shows an indicator of trust and authority in Google's eyes. As part of your SEO strategy, the professional SEO services Brisbane company expert team says that you cultivate backlinks from other websites about topics related to your business niche.
The more backlinks you have, your site will likely rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs). If a local business has five or six citations on third-party sites plus a couple of mentions by local newspapers and blogs, it could mean more visibility for its website than a national chain store with ten times as many citations but no mentions in print media or blog posts.
Conclusion
Local SEO is a powerful tool that can help you increase business at your door. By improving your local citations, claiming your Google My Business listing, refining your web pages, and asking for reviews, you can attract more customers to your store and increase sales. And cultivating backlinks from trusted websites will make it easier for potential customers to find your site online.
