Search engine optimization is one of the most vital marketing channels for local businesses these days.
Think about how many people walk around a city each day and will search on their phone to determine where they’ll eat lunch, meet a friend for coffee, or pick up flowers on their way home.
Three years ago, Google reported that 50% of mobile searches were local. At the time, that number was increasing, so by now that number is likely much higher. This search engine land article reveals some heavy statistics about consumer behavior with local search.
In a more recent study, Greg Sterling found that 96% of all PC owners, 79% of mobile phone owners and 81% of tablet owners use their devices to regularly conduct local searches. In addition, the study found that the top reason for these searches was for a specific business, and the second most common reason was a “category search.”
Basically, these were searches looking for a business within a specific product or service category, without a specific business in mind.
As a small business owner, why wouldn’t you try and take full advantage of making sure your business is there when those searchers are looking for your service? The advertising methods of old are precisely that, old. It is time for small and local business owners to upgrade their efforts in order to enhance their bottom line in today’s marketplace.
However, as we all know, it is much tougher to implement an SEO strategy than simply saying that every local and small business owner SHOULD capitalize on search. Therefore, let’s break down the process for local business owners into some simple steps that will completely change the online visibility of their company.
Commit To It
If you’re committed to being known in your local area, you have to be found first.
This is not as simple as just having a Facebook account. Yes, a complete local marketing strategy needs things like social media and email to engage with people who know your business. But, the search results on Google, Bing, Yahoo, or even YouTube are where new customers can discover your business for the first time.
This is where you can truly distinguish your presence as a business.
Luckily for all of us, search engines are quite literally robots. They are extremely smart and thorough machines, but they have simple needs, and can even be predictable.
Optimizing your small or local business in the most effective way can come down to such simple steps as being consistent and thorough as you list and promote your business information on the web. Please the robots by giving them exactly what they want, simple and confirmable data, and they will please you with the results.
This step seems simple, but it takes a large commitment from companies. A company has to make the conscious decision to create and maintain consistent information, and be thorough enough to promote this information properly throughout the internet.
By simply maintaining this commitment level, your company will have a leg up on the majority of small and local business owners.
Keep Your NAP Consistent
Your business’ NAP (Name, address, and phone) is some of the most basic, but crucial information for search engines to identify your business. Moz calls NAP “the thumbprint of a business online.”
Search engines will cross reference the mentions of your NAP as they each individually appear with any additional mentions over the web to determine validity of your business.
Think of it this way: if a business has its NAP listed identically in 30 locations on the web across a number of websites (which could be business directories, articles, press releases, social media, etc), then Google will deem that a more valid business compared to a business with inconsistent or fewer listings.
This gets back to our main issue, make the search engine robots happy. Keep your company information clean and consistent, and the robots are happy.
In order to ensure you are in compliance with this rule, first start by making sure your NAP is always listed correctly on your site. Make sure it’s correctly listed on each page it appears on, and if you have multiple locations, have those listed separately on correlating location pages under the same site.
If you’re moving your business, you need to make sure all of your business information is updated so that you can maximize the clarity of your NAP to search bots. If you moved and failed to update your NAP information online, you’ll confuse search engines, and that leads to an unhappy robot.
Don’t Get Involved in “Black Hat” Tactics
Realizing that utilizing relevant keywords to increase your ranks can make black hat SEO tempting. When people say “black hat,” what they generally are referring to are tactics that boost a page’s ranking while violating a search engine’s terms of service.
Some of the more common black hat tactics are keyword stuffing, hidden text and sneaky redirects. All of these techniques were once popular but since have been deemed detrimental to the industry as a whole and so, have become penalized by search engines.
At this time, and especially as a small business, employing “black hat” strategies or trying to outsmart search engines to get on the front page of Google is just not worth it. If you gain any relative momentum from trying to do something sneaky, you will be noticed and stopped by Google.
Have Positive (and Relevant) Content
Another critical element of having successful SEO as a small or local business is having positive content on your site. The more interesting and relevant information you have on your website, the more likely search engines will be to able to find you.
Write up some blog posts or how-to’s that are related to any problems that your good or service solves. Make your site engaging for visitors, and keep the content relevant to searches by having page titles influenced by keyword research specific for your business.
For example, say you own a local basement waterproofing company, write an informative post titled “Basics of a Healthy Basement,” or make a demonstrative video titled “5 Household Tools That Can be Used to Waterproof Your Basement”. These would help your business’ SEO by directing people on the internet that need waterproofing services to your business site.
Build On-Going Citations
Building strong citations is one of the best ways to signal to search engines that your website is relevant to a specific location and for a specific line of work or subject. They’re the perfect place to get your NAP out there and give your business a strong catalog of listings.
You can claim your listings on Google Plus, Yahoo, and Bing for free, and if you haven’t done that yet, stop reading now, go do that, and come back for the rest of this article.
Seriously, having your business listed on Google Plus is giving Google your NAP info in the clearest way, which the search engine will appreciate and reward you for. Same goes for Bing and Yahoo.
According to localvox, 50% of local searches occur on directories and apps, rather than simply on search engines. The same post reports that 54% of Americans have substituted local search for phone books. To tie that back to your business, Google reported in 2011 that 88% of consumers who search for a type of local business on a mobile device – call or go to that business within 24 hours.
Most people know about Yelp or Angie’s list, but there are literally dozens more business directory sites you can take advantage of by claiming your online citations and keeping your NAP listed consistently across the web. You can try claiming as many of these as you can, or you can simply hire a local SEO service that already has an expert methodology to build out your citations properly.
Local citations are specific, as they have a focused target audience, and therefore they tend to be more effective in communicating to search engines.
There may not be one singular method for best employing SEO as a small or local business, but there are definitely steps that every company and business owner can take in order to properly and effectively implement SEO into their business. The trick, as always, is finding good advisors and following through with your efforts.
And, as always, keep the search engine robots happy.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
About the Author: Luke Harsel is currently an SEO apprentice at I’m From the Future studying content and outreach. When not on the Internet, he enjoys riding his bike and playing musical instruments, but not always at the same time.
