4 Local SEO Tactics to Implement in Your Business

As a business owner your business's visibility is hugely important because you want your prospective and current customers to be able to find your business.

It's more important than ever to be visible online.

For example, let's say you own a sandwich shop in Chicago, specifically in the Logan Square neighborhood. When a potential customer searches for “sandwich shop near me” or “sandwich shop Logan Square” on Google, you want your sandwich shop to show up in their search results over your competitors.

That's where local search engine optimization (SEO) can help.

But, what is local SEO?

Local SEO is the implementation of a variety of tactics with the intention of increasing online visibility, for a business with physical locations (brick-and-mortar).

The implementation of those tactics and the resulting increased online visibility will assist in creating new opportunities for your business.

Here are four tactics you can start today to begin or better your local SEO marketing strategy.

1. Create a Google My Business listing

Creating a Google My Business listing is the first step, and it's an essential step for your business to show up in local searches, maps, and other Google properties.

Your Google My Business listing would look something like the below in a Google search:

This step is essential. Without creating a Google My Business your company will not appear in local search queries specific to your product or service.

Read this article to improve your local ranking on Google.

2. Create local listings for your business

In addition to creating a Google My Business listing, you will want to create other local listings for your business on sites like Yelp, Foursquare, and Trustpilot.

When creating local listings you want to be sure to include information about your company that potential or current customers will be searching for:

• A phone number to reach your business
• Your business's hours
• Company address for directions
• Website
• Additional store information

Though, it is pertinent that the information you are providing for these local listings is accurate and correct. If not, your business will likely be unfavored by Google because of the poor customer experience that provides. For instance, let's say the sandwich shop in Logan Square had it's hours listed for Friday, on Yelp, as 12:00 PM - 9:00 PM, but on Google My Business their Friday hours were listed as 10:30 AM - 11:00 PM.

If a potential client showed up at your sandwich shop at 11:00 AM they would be frustrated to find you not open. Thus, providing them a bad experience.

This is what Google is trying to avoid by making accuracy and relevancy hold weight in local listings.

Aside from manually updating these local listings for your business you can also use a service like Yext that will manage the process and ensure your businesses information is always up-to-date.

3. Customer interaction will increase your visibility online

Interacting with customers by responding to their reviews will show you value them, helps build trust, and provides a personalized touch point with your customer base. Additionally, good reviews that are high-quality will increase your companies discoverability and will encourage potential clients to check out your business.

4. Help customer's find you - next steps

Local SEO as a whole, highlights the importance of building a quality and trusting relationship with clients. Pushing you as a business to provide relevant information that matches what someone is looking for and how your business in particular provides the best solution for them.

With these key notions propelling your business's visibility in local search results; making sure you have developed an online reputation management strategy will help increase the chances of your customer finding you.

With that in mind, read this blog to get started with reputation management.