As a small business owner, you should know that there are various reasons why local SEO is vital to your success. One of the main reasons though is the rise in the number of people who are conducting searches on their smart phones while they’re out and about. When your business shows up in these searches people are more likely to stop by and check out your products and services. If you want to benefit from this search engine traffic, there are some trends you’ll want to notice and put to work for your benefit.
Google Dominates Local SEO
Google is imperative to optimizing your website to receive traffic from the search engines. This is especially true of Google My Business and Google Maps as these two services are responsible for giving guidance and directions when someone is out in the community searching for a business like yours. As such, you must keep your listings up to date in terms of your business description, address, phone number, and hours of operation. Make sure you also include photos. All these things are used by Google if they choose to create a Knowledge Panel for your business. You’re more likely to be featured if you have a lot of information available for them to use.
Voice Search Continues to Grow
Voice assistants (e.g. Alexa, Siri) have helped people feel comfortable with talking instead of typing their requests. Experts believe that given time, this will be the most popular type of search. This is because it’s so easy and convenient to perform, especially if you’re searching for something while on the go.
As a business, you must understand the effect of these searches on your SEO. Think about how someone who’s looking for your business would conduct this type of search. Make sure you then optimize your content for this and for feature snippets which is what Google uses for these searches. The best way to optimize for this is to either create a FAQ or a list of features.
Use Local Friendly Keywords for SEO
To optimize your content for local SEO think about what customers would commonly type or say when they’re searching for a business like yours. Make sure to include keywords that reference your city, town, region, and neighborhood. You should also consider adding local landmarks and neighborhoods to your keywords too as they’ll easily meet your voice searchers’ needs.
Seek out Reviews
Yelp and Angie’s List led to the rise in popularity in people looking for online reviews of businesses. Today people aren’t looking for reviews as much, but they still do appear when someone searches for businesses like yours on Google. This is why these reviews are so much more important now. While you shouldn’t ask for positive reviews from your customers, you can still gently encourage them to leave a review for you. Then when you receive positive reviews they’ll be seen as a personal recommendation for your business.
Make Sure You’re Catering to Your Mobile Customers
There’s no doubt that mobile phones and local SEO are intricately intertwined. This is something you can’t afford to ignore. Instead you must:
- Use responsive web design.
- Make sure your website loads quickly, especially on mobile devices.
- Reduce the file size of your images so they’re mobile-friendly.
- Keep your fonts and layouts mobile-friendly. A single column layout with a large font that’s easy to read will work best here.
Conclusion
There really is a lot of information to learn and employ here. As a business owner who already has a lot to do already, this is something that you should trust to the professionals at ISEOU. They’ve helped many businesses improve their local SEO and yours can be next if you contact them today.