Local SEO 101: A Helpful Guide To Optimise Your Business Online
Posted on: February 17, 2022
Local SEO is an essential and powerful digital marketing tool for all businesses, especially small businesses and start-ups. At least 50% of searches in Google are ones that require local information. Hence, if your business is not optimised for such searches, you might actually be losing prospective customers who are genuinely interested in purchasing related products or services.
Essentially, local SEO is vital to ensure your business stays relevant. To guide you in your quest to stay relevant on search engines, we have compiled a fundamental guide that includes tips you can use and follow. Hopefully, in the end, you will have a much better understanding of optimising your business to reach your targeted customers!
What is Local SEO, and how does it work?
Local SEO, otherwise known as local search engine optimization, is a series of thoughtfully planned steps taken to improve the local search visibility of your business on search engines. By optimising local SEO, businesses are able to see an increase in their organic search traffic.
When consumers do a search on Google, the search engine searches for relevant content such as social media pages, links, citations, and published content. These search results are a result of optimised local SEO that helps connect the respective businesses to their intended customers.
If you are reading this, then the chances are that you are probably new to local SEO. So, here are some tips that might help you kickstart your business’s successful reach.
Local SEO Tips
1. Optimising your ‘Google My Business’ account
Google has developed a ‘Google My Business’ SEO tool to support businesses’ content sharing needs. To ensure optimal results from this tool, you will need to:
- Be engaging on your linked social media pages.
- Ensure the relevant contact information are consistent and updated accordingly.
- Encourage your customers to post their reviews and feedbacks on your business profile.
- Respond genuinely to any feedback.
As long as Google verifies that your business is authentic, you will also get a sidebar company profile when customers search for your product or services.
Do not do this just for the sake of local SEO. By ensuring that you have new reviews, updated content and the correct contact information, you also ensure that your customers have the best and most seamless experience searching for your business. This is especially vital as people are getting more specific in what they are looking for in recent years, as we see a shift in consumer shopping habits and behaviours.
2. Conduct regular audits of your local SEO
SEO is constantly evolving and moving forward. You can never find a fool-proof method that sticks. It is recommended that at the start of every SEO campaign, you should conduct an extensive audit to better gauge the health of your website and what you may need to do to optimise your website. A local SEO audit includes the following steps:
- Audit your ‘Google My Business’ page: Are the projected information up-to-date?
- Audit your on-page SEO: Does your site contain all required SEO elements?
- Research on your fellow competitors: How does your website stand against them?
- Audit your webpage: Check your webpage’s performance.
3. Improving your webpage’s internal links and related contents’ information
Having a well-planned internal link structure is equally important in boosting your SEO ranking. Internal links help to:
- Support navigation of the webpage
- Build a distinctive network of information
- Ensure a well-distributed ranking power and page authority of the website
In addition, well-written and optimised content is also essential in ensuring that Google picks up your webpage. In order for that to happen, you need to ensure that there is consistent posting of content on the website. This will allow Google to recognise that your business is active and likely recommend your business to consumers. Besides ensuring consistent posting of new content, you also need to ensure that your content contains relevant SEO elements, including high-volume keywords in your links, header, title, meta description, and body.
4. Make sure your webpage is mobile-friendly
As more consumers are using their mobile phones or tablets to do their searches on the go, it pays to ensure that your webpage is optimised for those devices as well.
Conclusion
Local SEO is an essential tool for businesses today. It is a way to ensure that they stay relevant to consumers. By optimising their local SEO, businesses can gain new customers, as well as retain loyal ones. Hopefully, at the end of reading this article, you get a better grasp of what you can do to improve your business’s search engine presence.
Nevertheless, if you still do not understand how to improve your local SEO, it always pays to engage a professional. At Impossible Marketing, we are one of the best SEO company in Singapore that is also approved for the PSG grant. Our services range from assisting you in auditing your webpage and coming up with custom solutions that help boost your business’ online presence.
With the PSG grant, your business can now offset up to 50% off our services to achieve the competitive edge you need online. So, what are you waiting for? Connect with us and get the best SEO package and price in Singapore!