In many cities and towns you see more and more vacant business and retail spaces. This has various causes. For example, high rents, a bad location or offering the wrong product or service. In addition, marketing also plays a major role. With the advent of the Internet, it seems increasingly difficult for local entrepreneurs to grow. A simple solution to this is to focus on local SEO.
Many people nowadays prefer to shop online and order their food easily and quickly through platforms such as Thuisbezorgd. As a local entrepreneur, how can you fight the Internet? There is only one answer to that: fight fire with fire. In other words, use the power of the Internet yourself . How to do this, you can read in this blog about local SEO.
What is local SEO?
Local SEO is a very powerful marketing method for both small businesses and local entrepreneurs. In fact, research shows that four out of five consumers use search queries to find local information. If your business or website is not optimized for local searches, you are missing out on a lot of potential customers. This marketing method is best described as:
'Optimizing your website for locally oriented search terms.'
Local SEO is very important if you want your business to stay relevant. In this blog you will read how this method can be used effectively . You can do this by performing three main activities: fully optimize your Google My Business account, improve on-page SEO by applying website improvements and perform well on the Internet.
Optimizing Google My Company
Google My Company is the basis for effective Local SEO. This is the way for Google to check the content of a website and the quality of a service. So it is important that you create an account for Google My Business, create the page and get your business verified.
It is also advisable to use Google Posts within your account and encourage customers to make sure they share their online reviews. With Google My Company, you can gain all sorts of different insights. Think about what keyword certain people came to the page via. Once you have all this insight, you can act on it. If this is all too technical for you or you do not have enough time to optimize this, you can always contact Monkey Vision.
On-page optimization for local SEO
If you want to rank high in Google search engine results, it is important to fully optimize your website . Below are the five simple on-page SEO tips that can also help you with local SEO.
Optimizing the internal structure
Adjusting and optimizing the internal structure of a website provides an SEO boost. This is due to several reasons. A good internal structure simplifies and improves navigation on a website. For a user, it should be quickly clear where what information can be found. This is another reason why a good internal structure is important. It helps to structure information, which provides more clarity and transparency for the user. All this ensures that you achieve more conversions and fewer visitors leaving the website to order products.
Optimize URL, headers, meta description and content.
Content, content, content! Creating new content is very important for ranking well in the Google search engines. Each new blog you post is a new indexed page for your website. Within the content you create, it is important that you use relevant keywords or search phrases. With local SEO, it works a little differently.
Since you, as a local entrepreneur, want to focus primarily on customers in your area, it is therefore also important that you can be found on search terms in combination with your location and/or area. If you have a barbershop that only cuts men's hair in the Remote area, a good search term would be: men's hairdresser in Remote. So you make use of local SEO by adapting your search terms to your location. The reason you should do this is that when people search more specifically they are more interested in making a purchase. When someone searches on herenkapper Remote they are more interested in actually going to a hairdresser than when someone searches on Google for herenkapper.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the keywords you place in your content should be words that are actually searched for. Posting blogs and website text for local SEO is ineffective if no one is searching for your keywords. So you want words and phrases that the target audience is searching for. Which ones they are you will find out by doing a keyword research.
Location pages
Do you have a business that offers its services or products in multiple locations? Then it makes sense to create different landing pages when looking at using local SEO. Think of it as an about us page for each different location where you offer your products or services. On these pages you can describe what you do, but you can also include general details. Think of this as opening hours, description of the store, parking options, special locally-bound promotions and customer reviews.
For location pages, avoid duplicate content. It is neither convenient nor wise to use exactly the same texts for each page. Google gives "penalty points" for this. Do you only have one location as a business owner? Then it's best to create one locally descriptive about us page. It is also not useful to put all kinds of different locations with the same content on the website itself. This is redundant and can create ambiguity when navigating website visitors.
Local content
Google is constantly evolving. This means the Google search engine is getting smarter with each passing year. If you get started writing content, it is important that you write for the users and not for the search engines. Whereas before you were fine with listing as many keywords as possible, now it's mostly about helping users. When creating your Web site content, remember that it is important to focus your attention on the local audience.
General topics naturally attract a lot of audience, however, these are often taken by the "big boys. If you own a hamburger restaurant, you don't want to compete with McDonalds in terms of SEO. After all, you won't win over them. Therefore, focus primarily on the local audience (i.e. use local SEO) and create content that is of value to the people within your area. Think about promoting local networking events, local news or developing educational and fun content.
A mobile-friendly website with local SEO
Many people searching for a product or service locally use their smartphones to do so . As many as nine out of ten smartphone users perform local searches on their device. Users not only look for the closest business they need, but also reviews of the business, directions to your location and contact information. Make sure you make it as easy as possible for your potential customers by making the site mobile-friendly.
With local SEO you ensure that potential customers in the immediate vicinity come to your company. If you do not use local SEO, chances are that they will go to a competitor.
