Local Businesses! Harness the Power of Local SEO

Local Businesses! Harness the Power of Local SEO | Vicinus.ai

For both small and large businesses, local SEO is essential for businesses to get found by potential customers. This is because local SEO helps businesses get found in specific locations. This type of local strategy relies on making your business found via local leads and local searches online too.

There are quite a few ways in which you can optimise your local SEO via traffic, leads and conversions too. By optimising your local SEO, smaller businesses can even compete against larger, national businesses at the same time.

For more information on this, please check out our blog post here:

According to a review trackers study, a massive:

35% of all search traffic is local

So, what are some ways that you can optimise your local SEO? 

1. Local Business Google My Business (GMB) Account

One of the first things you need to do is to optimise your Google listing (or create one if you haven’t already). This is because having a Google My Business listing can help you not only rank higher in the local map pack (the top three results) but for Google Maps too. 

For a guide on how to set up your Google My Business listing for your local business, please check out our blog post here:

There are a number of ways that you can optimise your Google My Business listing:

• Verify ownership of your GMB profile
• Your information is updated and accurate
• Include all information that the GMB profile asks you to (in other words, make sure your profile is fully complete)
• Include relevant and high-quality images
• Get customers to leave reviews
• Respond to said customer reviews
• Frequently publish posts on your GMB dashboard

2. Get Reviews for your Local Business

There is no doubting the power of reviews. Whether negative or positive, potential customers take into account not only the star rating and the content of a previous customer review, but they also take into account the response to said review too.

This is because:

45% of consumers are more likely to visit a business if it responds to negative reviews.

This means that responding to reviews is essential to not only gaining new customers but also retaining the loyalty of previous customers too.

If your business has multiple locations, responding to reviews can almost seem like an impossible task. This is where Vicinus can help.

Building a great business reputation begins with developing trust between businesses and customers. Vicinus helps to create relationships with customers by making it easy to engage with reviews online using Machine Learning Technology and an Auto-Response feature.

3. Optimise Local Voice Search

Voice search has grown exponentially over the past few years. As a result of the development of smartphones as well as smart speakers, optimising your local SEO for voice search is essential.

“In fact, the latest research figures show that as many as

34.7 million

consumers in the US are expected to shop using the voice search feature on their smart speakers in 2020”-

(Emarketer, 2019).

What this means is that in your content, you should be using more long-tail keywords as these are more regularly used in voice searches. Not only this, but writing content in a more conversational tone is a great way of optimising as well as incorporating question starters in your text too.

4. Optimising your Local Business Website for Mobile Searches

Mobile searches have overtaken desktop searches in recent years. In fact:

‘

82% of smartphone users do phone-based searches before making in-store purchases.’

Your website should be optimised for mobile searches in order to gain potential customers. There are some ways in which you can optimise your website for mobile searches below:

• Help optimise website loading speed (three seconds is optimal)
• Utilise visuals and bigger text
• Copy used sparingly, especially on homepages
• Use intuitive UI for great mobile-optimized UX

5. Use Local Keywords to Show in Local Searches

Utilising

is essential for getting your local business found in localised searches. The keyword planner helps develop a list of locally relevant keywords, and potentially ones that are competitive too. 

• Meta content & alt text
• Copy such as blogs & website homepage
• URL’s
• & more

These types of keywords should have region-specific keywords in order to capitalise on hyperlocal searches. 

6. Use Online Business Directories to Boost your Local Business

Some of the most popular online business directories are:

• YellowPages
• Yelp
• FourSquare
• And More!

On these business directories, adding your local business name, address and phone number will help boost your local SEO and help the directories get your business visible too.

The Vicinus platform features real-time management and creation of business listings across multiple platforms, insights into performance, building and monitoring online reputation, and more.

For full local optimisation, Vicinus also assists in creating SEO-friendly location pages for each of your business locations.

For more information,