Local SEO Company
Local SEO is a well-known concept that many consider crucial for the success of their business. Whether your business is conducted online or offline, an online presence and strong SEO are important. Depending on the type of business you run, you may choose to focus on general SEO or local SEO. Local SEO is geared toward helping you build an online presence for an audience local to you.
This helps you reach customers that are able to easily access and enter your physical store. By maintaining a strong local online presence, you can keep both new and loyal customers engaged and interested. When you’re active online, you’ll be at the top of your customer’s minds when they’re looking for what you have to offer!
Read on to learn how to boost your online presence in the city and attract customers that already want to buy from you.
How to Boost Your Online Presence in the City
The first step to successfully creating a local SEO strategy is to set up a strong website that’s easy to navigate. If you’re unsure how to build a solid website, there are plenty of great web designers out there who can help you!
This is just the start. Once your website is in place, there are many things you can do to optimize it for your local audience:
Create Locally Relevant Content
Regardless of what your business is, it’s always useful to publish a blog on your website. These days, this is very easy to do and is immensely helpful when building an online presence. Your blog should be both entertaining and helpful, answering questions about your business, and teaching your customers new things.
To attract your desired local audience, focus on content that’s relevant to your city. For example, a Toronto-based music store could create posts about local concerts and music festivals in the city that their audience won’t want to miss. You could even take this a step further and write reviews on said performances once they’re over.
Create enough locally relevant content like this and your audience will begin to see you as a trusted source of useful information. This keeps them coming back and keeps you at the forefront of their mind!
Set up Google My Business
Google is undeniably the most popular and powerful search engine, so you must ensure you’re readily available in their search results. By creating a profile with Google My Business, you’re essentially carving out your own space within Google.
Once you verify your business and prove ownership, your hours, location, and contact information will be posted and potential customers can find you more easily. You may even pop up as a search result if someone is searching for your exact type of business.
This also lets you receive and respond to reviews. A long list of positive reviews posted publicly for all to see goes a long way in building trust with customers.
Stay Active on Social Media
Like a good website and informational blog, social media is crucial to a strong online presence. There are many platforms to choose from now, so you’ll have to decide where to focus your efforts. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are among the most popular, though each is used more heavily by different demographics.
For example, younger audiences may spend more time on Instagram and TikTok, while older generations may be on Facebook and Twitter. You can create profiles on all of them, but managing each account takes time.
Once you decide which profiles to engage on, though, stay active! You should aim to post three times per week at the very least. A few things to keep in mind when posting:
- Keep posts short, interesting, and engaging. Perhaps end the post with a question for your followers to answer.
- Utilize keywords on social media just like you would on a blog!
- Use clear, relevant, and good-quality images.
- Stay engaged. Spend time responding to comments and answering questions.
Link Building
There are two parts to a link-building strategy: internal linking and inbound links.
Internal linking is when you link to different pages of your own website. For example, if you own a cleaning service, you may write a blog post about tips for keeping your home clean. Within this post, you may mention the use of a product you also offer. If you’ve written a blog post about this specific product, link to it!
If you haven’t written a blog post detailing this specific product, consider writing one, for the purpose of increasing internal links. Internal links have a few benefits:
- It improves your ranking and domain authority within Google
- It keeps people on your website longer and exposes them to more of your company
- It increases and distributes the ranking power among multiple pages on your site
An inbound link is when another website links to yours. A good example of this is a local business directory, or a customer reviewing your business on their own blog or social media page with a link to your website.
Inbound links tell Google that other people value your website and view you as an authority. This can dramatically increase your domain authority and your ranking in searches.
Optimize for Mobile
Lastly, you must optimize your website for mobile navigation. These days, people spend ample amounts of time browsing the web on their phones – sometimes more than on a computer! If your website isn’t responsive and mobile-friendly, you instantly alienate any customer that may come across you on their mobile device.
If you’re unsure how to create a website that looks good on a computer and a tablet/cell phone, there are many web designers out there who can help. It’s a worthy investment as you’ll maximize your exposure, ranking power, and potential customer pool.
Don’t Neglect Your Local Audience
While the idea of reaching a global audience is enticing and exciting, you can’t neglect the city you live in. Especially if your business has local operations, you must appeal to the people who are able to walk in the door. The tips listed here are a great place to start, but it’s important that you stay committed. One or two blog posts and a week of social media activity won’t sustain your strategy!
Just remember that it’ll be worth the time and effort when you have loyal, repeat customers who can’t wait to refer their friends.
