Why Digital Marketing is Important for Small Businesses

Fifty percent of small businesses fail within their first five years of operation. Those are sobering statistics. When any small business is launched, they tend to focus on how they can attract customers. Traditional advertising is often used, like coupon mailers, printed ads or even billboards. All too often, they believe that their service or […]

7 Local SEO Tips for Your Small Business

The Internet is constantly getting more competitive and high, non-local organic search engine rankings are harder to achieve.

The new “3-pack” from Google has made things even more competitive. There are even less screen real estate in the local Google maps than before. (It used to be the 7-pack, not too long ago).

But for many businesses, especially small businesses that target their local markets, the most relevant forms of traffic come from local search.

What can you do?

1. Use keywords to target local areas

Targeting a local market can make Google local SEO go a long way, especially since high rankings in local search are much less competitive.

For example, contractors targeting keyword phrases such as “general contractor” will have to compete with virtually every other English-speaking general contractor in the world, while businesses targeting “elkhart general contractor” will only have to compete with general contractors in Elkhart who happen to own a website and are actively trying to SEO optimize their websites.

TIP: Adding location & local phone numbers modifiers that describe your keywords and pages better, tend to have a higher conversion rate as well.

2. Get listed in directories

One of the first steps toward getting local traffic is to try to get listed in all of the free local directories. There is no reason to not be listed in Google My Business (Google Places) or Bing Local.

Many users will go to these locations first when trying to find a local business.

Most likely, you’ll see references to your business already, but the information may be wrong. It’s time to do an audit and updates these listings for consistency to the information on your website.  Check out more information via our local SEO consultant agency in Los Angeles.

3. Focus on other search engines

Most businesses try to focus their efforts on reaching high Google search engine results. And, when aiming for local targeted markets, focusing efforts on other local search engines, such as Bing (Local) Maps, can also be helpful, and is recommended.

However, we continue to see that Google Local SEO tends to have the fastest and potential best return, and we recommend starting there.

4. Register the domain name with the business

Another important thing that businesses might want to do is register their domain names with their current business addresses. Some evidence suggests that Google uses the address that the website is registered under as a way to rank local search results.

The location of the business in the map “centroid” is another indicator of relevance.

Read Full Article Here: 7 Local SEO Tips for Your Small Business