by: Bobby Zimalis 
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This Top 10 Local Business SEO Guide – written for 2021-22 – is designed to help companies gain the power of Internet marketing by focusing on the stuff that truly matters… web standards and SEO ranking factors change often so staying updated is key.
HOW TO STAND ABOVE YOUR COMPETITORS IN LOCAL SEARCH RESULTS.
This Local Business SEO Guide has been *updated for the 2021-2022 business year.
The local business benefits are massive!
By far, the MOST IMPORTANT local business SEO tip that I or any other SEO can offer, is to get your business listed in (GMB) Google My Business, now known as Google Business Profile (GBF).
The Local Business benefits are immense.
Not only does creating a GMB Listing help Google display your website search results in a more structured way – more keyword related links for web users to potentially click on – but it also plays a big role in how Google initially indexes your overall site. Going through the business validation process is an important factor to Google.
I doesn’t take much time and, it’s FREE!
It’s important to take FULL advantage of all the features that GMB offers when it comes to listing your business: business category (primary and others), photos, prices, reviews, blog posts, etc.
Be thorough .. the more info you input into your GMB account, the better. Give Google as much data as it can store so it can output as much info as possible when people search for your business.
A responsive website is a key Google ranking factor …
Visit any local cafe anywhere around the world and you’re more than likely to see someone using their smartphone or tablet to surf the web. They’re checking their email. They’re sending SMS messages. They’re browsing YouTube and other Social Media sites and they’re using mobile apps to search for products or services to purchase or order.
Mobile devices are everywhere in the digital world and their growth in popularity and usage is not showing any signs of slowing down.
In 2020, 68% of website traffic came from mobile devices – an increase from 63.3% in 2019. Desktops drove 28.9% of visits, while 3.1% of visitors came from tablets.
So, what is a responsive website and how will it benefit my Local Business listing?
A responsive website simply means that the site has been designed to ‘respond’ visually to whatever device happens to be accessing it.
The website layout adapts to fit into the screen instead of having the user constantly zooming in to certain parts of the website to see something of interest on the page.
The Local Business advantages of having a responsive website are plentiful:
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate has become a VERY important search engine listing factor
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) enabled websites are quickly becoming standardized web protocol.
Not only do people trust websites that are secure but so does Google: An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate has become a VERY important search engine listing factor for Google.
Think about it this way: When a visitor arrives to your website and is greeted by a browser warning message that proclaims ‘This Site is NOT secure’, do you think that visitor is eager to fill out a form or input their credit card details on your site?
Basically, if your competitor’s website has an SSL license and yours doesn’t, their website will be listed higher than yours. It’s as simple as that.
SSLs are server-based and are relatively affordable.
Some hosting companies offer SSLs for free and some charge a yearly fee (around 20-30$) to have one installed on your server.
How on-SITE SEO Benefits Local Business Listings
Even in 2021, the importance of old-school, quality Meta Tag optimization can’t be overlooked if you want your local business to be highly visible in Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPS).
Even though the keyword tag has all been made obsolete by Search Engine algorithms, the title tag and the description tag are still TOP ranking factors for Google.
The title tag holds a higher significance as it’s read by both the Search Engine Robots that crawl & index your site AND by web users deciding which Google listing to click on.
The Title tag should reflect the ‘keyword’ content of the page itself. If the webpage is talking about ‘screen door hinges’ than the title of the page should be ‘screen door hinges’.
Other on-site SEO optimization techniques include: writing in-depth quality content; streamlining your website navigation; cleaning up unnecessary back-end code that clutter servers and reduce page speed loading times.
Make Dedicated Pages for EACH service or product that you offer or sell
As a local business owner looking to harness the power of the web, you have to provide Google with as much rich, keyword relevant content as possible.
Your search engine results and website visitors will reflect those SEO improvements.
If your business offers 10 different services then each of those services should have its own uniquely optimized web page.
10 services pages = 10 additional keyphrases for your site
10 services pages = 10 more pages for Google to Index
10 services pages = 10x more visitors to your website.
Same rule applies for the various products that you might be selling on your ecommerce website – each product should have its own uniquely search-engine-optimized web page.
In addition to offering more content for Google to index, having unique services pages also allows the website visitor to gain a clearer understanding of how your services might benefit them.
It’s a powerful factor for how Google sees the structure of your website
Internal Linking is linking your keyword-rich text to keyword-content specific page(s) on your website.
It’s a powerful factor for how Google sees the structure of your website and inevitably serves as a factor in how it ranks your website.
eg: if your website mentions the keyphrase ‘Iowa landscaping services’ 15 times throughout the site, then, every instance of that keyphrase should link to a page on your site called, ‘Iowa landscaping services’ that has been SEO optimized for that keyphrase.
Google will see that one page as the repository for that keyword which will give it a boost in importance.
External Linking seems counter-intuitive at first – why would you want to send your website visitors to another website? – but if you’re outbound links lead the visitor to quality authority sites on that specific topic, then it will also see your site as a presence for that keyword as well.
If you do it will, your content is fresh, relevant and useful, than other websites will start linking back to your site, which is called backlinks.
In the grand scheme of SEO things, backlinks are enormously important cause they’re hard to come by and they give credence to the ‘authority site’ factor.
BING receives in excess of 1Billion visits per month
Local Business Listings are predominantly a Google domain but people seem to forget that BING receives in excess of 1Billion visits per month.
As a local business owner, can you really afford to give up that advertising opportunity?
Some of the local business benefits of including your business in ‘BING Places For Business‘ include:
creates a cohesive brand identity and a unified user experience
Brand consistency is often an overlooked aspect of local business SEO.
Ensuring a consistent brand experience across all marketing & social media channels creates a cohesive brand identity and a unified user experience for both existing and potential new customers.
Beyond just ensuring that the ‘look’ of the brand (logo, colors, fonts) is consistent, it is of VITAL importance that your company NAP (name, address, phone number) are also consistent.
You want to keep your contact information consistent across all of the directories where you are listed cause you never know where someone might find your company information.
This not only boosts your SEO, but also helps keep your branding focused on attracting new clients.
Tracking where your website visitors are coming from and how they got there
Local Business owners need to know what their customers are thinking, what they’re hoping to find and how they initially found the business or website.
Tracking where your website visitors are coming from and how they got there can serve as an invaluable tool to help you grow your local business into the future.
It can help you create new pages that target specific keywords that you didn’t think about and in the process lead to more conversions and sales.
However, raw website data needs to be processed to be understood.
They’re are countless of web analytic tools that you can use – some Free, some not – but Google Analytics, to me, is still the king of data retrieval as it can connect to pretty much all other SEO tools or apps.
The Local Business benefits of using Social Media as a marketing tool are too many to mention in this singe article.
From Instagram stories to guide your client along the local business journey – which helps build client trust – to Facebook Business / Company pages to interact with your existing and find potentially new clients, to YouTube videos that showcase your business presence, using social media is a marketing bonanza.
Most social media sites are absolutely free to use and the only real cost is in the time that you put into telling or sharing your local business story.
Local business owners that have taken that online plunge quickly realize that the best SEO practices usually the ones that lead to the best results.
There are MANY ways to grow your local business without draining your budget.
Hopefully, I offered a few suggestions in this article to help you in that endeavor and if you need some SEO assistance, send me an email.
Thanks for reading.
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