How to Leverage Local SEO for Your Online Business

Small business, medium size firms and huge multinational companies have all embraced the need for increased online visibility considering the pace at which the digital economy has been growing. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) enables these businesses to operate efficiently online, increase the traffic onto their website and attract loyal customers.

As a small business in the nascent stages, it becomes rather difficult to compete with larger, better recognized brand names and businesses. Here is where your local SEO will come into picture, helping one reach the most relevant customers and building a stable consumer base. Local SEO optimises data and content on the website to make it locally focused, making it the most viable way to get one’s potential customer’s attention. It ensures that one increases his or her return on investment via the website.

How does one go about leveraging local SEO for his or her online store?

Step 1: Check if basics are in order

This involves looking into the following –

1. Check if the site is easy to search and navigate.
2. Check if the site loads quickly and depicts information and graphics accurately.
3. Check the site’s browsing experience on different devices such as mobile, laptops, tablets etc.
4. Revisit and evaluate the content on the website and see if the information and graphics present are useful to the users.
5. Check if the website is regularly updated.
6. Link content from other sites to add authority to the information presented.
7. Ensure that the site is made in a manner that it is easy for the viewer to assimilate the information.

Step 2: Hire a local SaaS SEO company in Philadelphia to effectively manage your digital marketing strategy

While this is a completely optional strategy, it is important to delegate the work that is difficult to manage and handle by someone who lacks the expertise in this field, and get in touch with the SEO Company in Philadelphia. While hiring such an agency might place some strain on one’s financial resources in the earlier stages, the payoff from the same over a long run is good, making it a worthy investment.

Step 3: Tailor-making content to suit the local audience

1. One can use the Google My Business free tool to make your listing more visible and accurate. Add relevant information such as one’s name, location, website, opening hours etc. to ensure that google searches throws up our information accurately. While using this tool ensure that you choose the right business category to increase traffic in case of specific google searches.
2. Utilise the keyword research to find the words that are a balance between the most popular search terms and locally relevant variants. One may use the Google Keyword Planner tool to help arrive at the most relevant keywords. For more advanced users SEMrush is ideal.
3. Build relationships with the most authoritative businesses in one’s area and generate backlinks with them. One can even opt in for more specific backlinking opportunities such as creating a guest post for a local blogger, or participating in local events, or sponsoring charity events in the locality. This increased visibility offline or online with authoritative sources will definitely augment one’s website traffic.

To conclude

Developing a good SEO strategy requires a good long-term thinking that is in touch with the times. The goal must be to grow organic traffic over a period time and not expect a sudden surge in traffic which is short lived. Getting your local SEO strategy right might just be the only obstacle between you and success, so do give it some thought and get in touch with an SEO Company.