Do you know how to boost local SEO in 2019 to increase sales? For your business/brand to gain global relevance on search engines, it must have gotten the local relevance. In order for you to get that local relevance, you need to reach your local audience. How do you reach your local audience? You can only reach your local audience through local SEO. Local SEO is a distinct and vital aspect of digital marketing today. In today’s world, every business is expected to have an online presence. This is because the world has moved to the digital age and virtually everyone is online. When you come across local SEO, it refers to promoting your business in your local area.
When people go online to search for a particular product, they look for the nearest companies to them. So it would be easy for them to navigate the location and purchase the product. If you haven’t invested in local SEO, you would be nowhere to be found. They’ll go to the next available brand that has successfully worked on their local SEO. You would have lost that customer by then. This implies that your local relevance is very weak. Before we move forward, let’s define what Local SEO is.
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What Is Local SEO?
Local SEO is the optimization of your website so it can be relevant and rank better locally. It allows the local audience to find your website easily. It increases the visibility of your page to people in your geographical location. Local SEO makes your business a success because it attracts local prospective customers to your business. This means your relevance has increased in your local area. Business owners can easily take over the market in their locality with local SEO. If you want to convert leads to sales, invest in local SEO.
You must have thought to yourself, why do you even need local SEO? Well, we’ll help with the answer to that. Below are what you stand to get when you invest in local SEO.
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How To Boost Local SEO To Increase Sales In 2019
The impacts of local SEO on your business/brand can never be overemphasized. Since you know what local SEO is, let’s find out its benefits and why every business/brands need it. Here are the benefits of local SEO.
1. Spend Less Money On Adverts
When you optimize your website for local SEO, you do not need to spend a lot on advertising. For small businesses, you’ll spend little or no money at all on adverts. Local SEO would help your business rank locally on search engines. When people search for your industry, the location and name of your business will pop up. Then, people will be able to have access to your website directly.
2. Your Website Would Be Found Organically
For your business/brand to be seen and found organically, you need local SEO. It would place your business on the search engine’s organic search results. This way it would be easy to find your business on search engines without any extra promotion.
3. Directs More Traffic To Your Website
Increasing your traffic daily is not easy. Local SEO allows the local audience to find your website easily which automatically increases your traffic. Most people use their mobile phone to make orders or purchase products, local SEO will drive them to your website. When this happens, the number of people on your site increases.
4. Promotes Brand Credibility
When people find your website on the first page of search engines, it proves that your brand is trustworthy and credible. It builds the trust of prospective customers and people tend to believe your brand is all about and what it stands for. The contents on your website become more useful to solve people’s problems.
5. Gets You New Customers
Do you know that local SEO gets you more customers? The higher your rank on search engines, the more visibility you get. When you get the required visibility, more customers purchase your products/services. The more your business is seen, the higher the chances of purchase by your prospective customers. The interesting part of this is that most of your customers would be from your local area. This is as a result of the local SEO.
Having equipped yourself with the benefits of local SEO, how do you boost it in order to help you make more sales.
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How To Boost Local SEO In 2019
Optimizing your website for local searches is critical for all businesses especially small-scale businesses. This is why you need to know how to make local SEO work for you. When you know the ropes, you’ll be surprised at its impact on your business. Here’s how to boost local SEO in 2019.
1. Get Your Google My Business Page
Registering a Google My Business Page is the first step to making local SEO work for you. This page registers your presence on Google and also allows people to reach you when you’re offline through Google Map. It also leads people to all your social media channels. It gives prospective customers your business information like your opening hours, office address, closing hours, website, working days, phone number and many more.
Through this platform, you can monitor any queries that come up when someone searches for something relating to you. If you don’t set up Google My Business Page, you are missing quite a lot of opportunities to be in front of your prospective customers. This page is free and it takes less than 30 minutes to create. After setting up Google My Business Page, ensure you verify your business listing by claiming the page. Else, someone else can still the page.
When they steal the page, it would be hard to get it back, so, it’s important to claim your page and you’re on your way to making your business well recognized on local searches.
2. Update The NAP On The Home Page
The NAP (Name, Address, Phone) is very important when optimizing your website for local SEO. To boost your local SEO, ensure your NAP information on your website is the same as that on your social media and other online channels. It helps search engine to recognise your business easily and rank it. Use precisely the same NAP even on your Google My Business Page when you’re setting it up. Add the NAP information at the footer of your website. Also, make sure your phone number clickable so they can call you directly from their mobile.
3. Improve Your Website Loading Speed
Your website speed is one of the key ranking factors on search engines. You’ll discourage your prospective customers if your website takes too much time to load. No one has the patience to stay and wait for your page to load when it’s slow. When your site takes a long time to load, it sends bad signals to search engine which ends up affecting your ranking. Ensure you reduce the sizes of any heavy visual display on your website. The loading time of your website is very important. Pay attention to it.
4. Optimize Your Site For Local Positioning
To have a successful local SEO, you need to optimize every feature and content on your website. Input the keywords in your URLs, image alt tags, pages’ titles and meta description. You can also input your business locations and name can also be inputted into the URLs, pages’ titles, image alt tags and other necessary places. Ensure you don’t overuse the keywords so you don’t fall into the situation of keyword stuffing. Have a detailed contact us page on your website that contains your phone number, working hours, website address, email address, name and address.
5. Upgrade To A Mobile-Friendly Website
The use of mobile devices keeps increasing daily as more people like to access the internet on the go. Due to this development, most people make their searches through their mobile devices. This is why you need to make your website mobile-friendly. Your potential customers can be on their mobile searching for you. If you’re nowhere to be found, it’s bad for rankings and sales. Google also considers mobile-friendly websites than other ones. So, when you’re developing or upgrading your website, ensure it’s mobile-friendly.
6. Build Your Brand Reputation With Reviews
You should know by now that most people won’t buy products blindly. They need some assuring words that will prove that the products are of great quality as you have described it. Reviews are what will convince them for you without lifting a finger. Having good reviews on your site is one thing you should hold on to. Search engines will rank your website high when people talk about your products positively and when there’s a lot of engagements on your site.
You should encourage them to give put their reviews on your Google My Business Page. Focus on getting lots of reviews on that page. Offering quality products/services is not enough, you need to persuade your customers to leave positive reviews on your page.
7. Optimize Your Website “Near me” Keyword
“Near me” is a common term used when people are searching for products/services around them or in their local area. For your local SEO to be complete, you need to include this phrase as a keyword in your image alt, meta title, meta description and more. You can’t afford to throw away this simple strategy that would help your page rank.
Local SEO is sometimes underrated yet it’s one of the most powerful ways of transforming your leads to sales. Ensure that these tips provided above are followed to the letter. These tips also need consistency to be able to work effectively. If you follow these tips, you would be able to boost local SEO in 2019.
If you need an agency to handle your local SEO, contact us today via our website, www.digitalmatrixagency.com and you’ll be glad you did. We offer this service at an affordable price. You don’t have to break the bank.
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