For small businesses, one of the biggest challenges is standing out from the surrounding competition, particularly other small businesses in your area that may offer similar services or products. There are several digital marketing strategies you can use to stay competitive, such as local SEO. Learn more about how this digital marketing strategy can make your small business more visible, increase your client leads, and help you stay competitive.
Why Local SEO Can Hugely Benefit Small Businesses
Local SEO is a strategy that helps your small business become more visible in search engine inquiries with location tags. For example, if you search ice cream shops in New Jersey, Google, Bing, or other search engines will pull up a list of ice cream shops in the general area. Your location-based SEO strategy can take many forms, including matching your SEO location tags to the name of your city, the specific neighborhood you’re in, or even your zip code.
There are a few specific ways in which this SEO strategy can be a huge benefit for small businesses. For example, using this strategy can be cost-effective, increase your local leads and online visibility, introduce your small business to new platforms, and help you manage a good reputation.
Cost-Effective
Your small business is probably already using a digital marketing strategy that implements SEO in some way. This is because the advent of Google Analytics and other similar software has made SEO one of the most prominent strategies small businesses can use to reach consumers who are searching for specific products online. It’s easy to add local tags to your SEO services, particularly if SEO is one of your main marketing strategies in the first place.
Furthermore, using location tags for your SEO strategy is an easy way to increase the return on investment for your digital marketing strategy. This is because many consumers are looking for products or services that are in their immediate location. By adding a location to your SEO strategy, you will be able to reach consumers who are in your geographical area, which can increase the revenue of your business.
Online Visibility
Boosting your online visibility is one of the best benefits of using a location-based SEO strategy. When your website is high on search engine rankings, this gives consumers the impression that your products and services are popular and that your brand has a high level of trustworthiness.
By increasing your online visibility, you can easily build your business because you can more easily reach new consumers. Moreover, when consumers trust your business because of high search engine results, you are more likely to convert website traffic into sales.
Local Leads
For small businesses, it’s essential to generate many local leads because many small businesses are built on a backbone of community support. By increasing your local leads, you can strengthen the consumer base of your business, which will further build the reputation of your products and services.
Furthermore, increasing local needs can be exceptionally important for small businesses that have brick-and-mortar locations. If you can direct consumers from your website to your physical store, you can boost the sales of your small businesses twofold. You can even advertise store-only sales strategies to encourage customers to visit your brick-and-mortar location.
New Platforms
Another benefit of using location tags in your SEO strategy is the ability to put your business on new platforms. As important as it is to be high on search engine rankings, it’s also important that your website links back to reputable sites that help consumers place more trust in your business.
For example, websites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor are important for small businesses to use, since these websites are collections of reviews from previous customers that can help grow the reputation of your brand. Simply being on these new platforms can also increase the SEO results of your other digital marketing strategies.
Reputation
Using location tags as part of your SEO strategy is also a way you can benefit the reputation of your business. When consumers are looking for specific products and services within a geographical area, they tend to select businesses that have good reputations.
Much of the time, consumers will judge the reputation of a business based on reviews. If you can sync good reviews for your business with location tags, you can generate more leads for your business.
How Local SEO Can Help You Stay Competitive
Small businesses must stay competitive to stay alive, particularly if you want your small business to grow. Implementing an SEO strategy that uses location tags can help you stay competitive because it will put your business ahead of other businesses in your area that may not be using this type of location-based strategy. By increasing your online visibility, you can be more relevant than small businesses around you.
How Can You Implement This SEO Strategy?
Implementing an SEO strategy that uses location tags is very easy. If you want to increase your website traffic and stay competitive, your first step is to consult a digital marketing specialist who will be able to analyze the pain points in your current marketing strategy and give you the best advice on how to effectively use location tags. Some steps to use this SEO strategy include:
Fold SEO Into Your Digital Strategy
More likely than not, you will be able to fold your location-based SEO strategy into your current digital marketing campaign. Whether you are already using SEO marketing to increase your online visibility or you are using social media ads to gain more customer leads from other channels, you can easily add location tags to your current digital strategy.
A digital marketing expert will advise you on the best location tags to use to increase your consumer conversion. For example, a digital marketing specialist will explain the pros and cons of using a specific town name versus a metropolitan area to increase your online visibility.
Backlink to Your Website
Adding location tags to your SEO digital marketing strategy can help you improve the quality of backlinks to your website. One of the aspects of a good local SEO strategy is ensuring that your website has plenty of high-quality links that will increase the organic interest in your website.
Backlinks are exceptionally powerful since they will link your website to other reputable websites. Using location-based SEO to backlink to your website can be a successful strategy for small businesses.
Match On-Page and Off-Page Keywords
Finally, digital marketing specialists will help you match your on-page and off-page keywords to further optimize your SEO strategy. If you are including location tags in your SEO campaign, then your location tags on and off your website must be coordinated. Synchronizing your on-page and off-page keywords will prove to search engines that you have a high-quality website.
Adding location tags to your SEO strategy is one of many ways you can stay competitive. For small businesses, it’s essential to add location tags to increase online visibility, especially if one of your goals is to attract more local customers to a brick-and-mortar location. Book a consultation with a digital marketing specialist at Local Business Marketing Solutions to learn how to implement successful local SEO marketing for your business.
