SEO Improvement Tips for Local Businesses: How to Rank High on Google and Other Search Engines

In this age, it is difficult for your business not to have anything to do with the digital world. It’s either you do your business entirely online; you do it both online and offline, or you use digital tools and strategies for advertising or promoting the business. Whatever be the case, you certainly want to be visible online because the success of your business online depends on the visibility of your sales or service pages and those of your e-publications – blog posts, E-books, sales brochures, newsletters, and others.  

It is through such publications that you create awareness about your brand and, at the same time, consistently engage your audience who double as your customers or prospective customers. Whether your business pages and your online promotional materials will be discovered or not, depends in most part on how search-engine-optimised they are. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is, therefore, an important recipe for the success of your business online. In this article, we’ll look at different SEO factors and how you can better win the race.

How Local Businesses Can Improve SEO and Rank

Search Engine Optimisation is as vital to local businesses as it is to international ones. The reason is that people now mostly depend on search engines to find the products or services they need, precisely the ones within their locality. As a local business, you’ll be missing out on quantum opportunities to sell your products or services if your website and promotional efforts are poorly optimised.

Here are simple, easy, but highly effective tips to improve your SEO for local searches.

• Website and Content Optimisation

To enhance your SEO for local searches, the first two things you have to do is to optimise your web pages and content. Website or on-page optimisation has to do with designing, laying-out and improving the speed of your web pages, making it is easy for crawling and indexing by search engine crawlers. It also includes using relevant keywords adequately on your web pages to enhance their visibility. For proper on-page optimisation, the targeted keyword should appear in the title, meta descriptions, and on the body of the content that will fill up the pages.

In the same vein, you should also improve optimisation by publishing content such as blog posts, long articles, whitepapers, and other useful content, regularly on your website. Such publications should equally be optimised for specific keywords, particularly the keywords local customers use when conducting their searches.

• Local Business Listings

One of the easiest ways to let search engines know that your business exists in a particular locality is to register it on any of the online business listings. Online business listing is mostly free, which is an added advantage. While there are many online listing options available, Google My Business is highly recommended because of the popularity of Google and also because it is easy to update. To make the most of Google My Business, ensure that you complete as many fields as possible and select your category.

What is more? Google My Business now has a feature where those interested in your brand can ask questions and get answers. You can go a step further to create an FAQ and provide answers to them so your customers are well informed on how to engaged with your business. Lastly, you can register with more than one online listing, but you have to ensure consistency in your business details.

• “Steal” a Peep at Your Competitors

When prospective customers search for any of the keywords that is relevant to your business, your web page isn’t the only listing that shows up on the search engine result page (SERP). Others do too. Those other pages that show up are your competitors’, and the first 5 to 10 of them are very important to your business. For those pages to rank that high on SERP, they are doing very well SEO-wise.

It will be in your utmost interest to take a “deep look” at those pages, find out the reason behind their high SERP status, but also find out what they are not doing so well. With such information, you stand a better ground to improve your SEO such that it will be better than those of the 5 to 10 pages.

• Get Local Reviews

Every satisfied local client or customer is a unique opportunity to improve your SEO. All you have to do is to request genuine reviews from such clients or customers. The reviews can be on your website or third-party websites. Reviews, especially when they come from local consumers of your products or services, are a good SEO improvement strategy. They are one of the critical search engine ranking factors.

• Optimise for Mobile

It is no longer news that the majority of web users access the internet with their mobile phones. This has “compelled” Google to include mobile optimisation and responsiveness in the list of their ranking factors. Things can only continue in this line as more mobile phones with better features are being produced. You will be missing out on an excellent opportunity to rank high on Google if your website is not mobile-optimised.

• Write Tailored Content 

If your business is targeting local consumers, then you have to incorporate tailored content into your content marketing strategy. By this, it means that you should do blogs and publications that resonate with the local audience. That can be achieved by publishing some content based on some local events and happenings, and writing content with a tone that is familiar with the local audience.

Physically, a local business should also participate in community activities and outreach, reports of which should be published on the brand’s website. That encourages local customers to spend more time on the website when they visit it, thereby helping search engines to rank the site better.

How to Boost Your Website SEO

In the session above, we saw how important website or on-page optimisation is to SEO. We also briefly pointed out some of the steps and strategies for improving website SEO. Now let’s get down to the details – let’s see more of what needs to be done to boost website SEO and how to go about those things.  

• Title Optimisation

When prospects search for certain keywords, the hyperlinked texts of pages that show up on the search engine result page are the titles of the various pages. Therefore, your page title is essentially vital for SEO. It is what invites a user to click or not to click on your page when navigating through the list of links that appear on the SERP. For the improvement of the SEO status of your overall website, each page should have a title.

However, not only web pages should have titles. Blog posts, e-books, brochures, white paper, and other promotional materials should also have titles to make them discoverable. Titles that perform well SEO-wise should be brief, credible, eye-catching, and well-thought-out with relevant keywords – the keywords may be “exact” or “long tail” as the case may be.  

• Meta Description Optimisation

On web pages, titles are always followed by meta Descriptions. A Meta description is the brief descriptive text below titles as displayed on search results. It is a short preview of the information contained on a page. Therefore, it enables browsers to make up their mind whether or not your page is worth opening.

Meta descriptions have been recognised as an effective on-page SEO factor. For that reason, you must ensure that all your web pages have them. A meta description should also be concise, straightforward, engaging, and optimised with the relevant keyword(s). With these qualities, meta descriptions not only improve the SEO of your website but also attract and sustain the interest of web surfers to open your web pages.

• Ensure Your Pages Are Internally Linked

Search engines, notably Google, prefer a website that has its web pages internally linked, one to the other. That is because internally linking web pages makes it easy for search engine crawlers to crawl and index the pages, which is a prerequisite for good SEO score. Linking your web pages internally is equally beneficial because it makes for easy navigation from one page to the other.

The tendency is that if the pages of a website are internally linked, visitors are likely to spend more time on the page while engaging with whatever content available on it. That is another SEO boosting technique. Search engines take it that if people are spending much time on your website, then whatever is in it must be valuable. Therefore, it needs to be seen by more people.

• Optimisation of Images with Alternate Text

One of the facts of digital and content marketing is that users engage with images and videos more than they engage with texts. Therefore, you need to include videos and pictures on your website to improve its user experience. The problem, however, is that search engine crawlers do not “read” images. Hence, your pictures, no matter how engaging they are, cannot improve your website’s SEO.

The way to get around that problem, however, is to include “alternate texts” to your images and videos. The same thing goes for the sales brochures, flyers, and e-books you upload on your web pages. With the “alternate texts,” search engines will be able to interpret your images for what they are. Just like titles and meta descriptions, your “alternate texts” have to be concise, clear, and keyword optimised.

How to Improve SEO with Your Content

Apart from titles, meta descriptions, and alternate texts, you can further improve the SEO standing of your website through steady and quality content. Below are the strategies and ways to handle your content such that that it contributes amply to your website’s SEO improvement as it well should.

• Have a Blog

Blog posts are SEO improvement "gold mines". You are, therefore, losing a lot of opportunities, in terms of SEO, if you are yet to include a business blog on your website. Ponder this: other pages in your website – home, product, or service pages – are not expected to contain much content so as not to bore your audience. They are also created for specific purposes targeting specific keywords.

Blogs, unlike those other pages, give you more room for full content with which to educate, inform, and sometimes entertain your audience. What is more, every blog post is equivalent to a web page containing a title, meta description, image, video, alternate text. It also targets a particular keyword or a set of keywords. In blog posts, you can also include links to your e-books, sales brochures, flyers, and other promotional materials with their title equally keyword optimised.

• Research Keywords

To effectively use content to boost your SEO, you have to ensure that the content you publish is based on the “right keywords.” The right keywords here refer to the actual words contained in your prospective visitors’ search queries. If the keywords in your content are different from the ones your audience use when searching for services, products, or information concerning your business, the likelihood is that your pages will not show up when they search.

To know the right keywords to use in your content, you should make use of different keyword research tools available. Even with the right keywords, you have to beware of using it the wrong way, “stuffing” your content with it, for instance, as that will affect your SEO more than it will ever improve it.

• Research Your Audience and Write for Them

Who is your prospective audience? Where are they, and what language do they speak? You must, first of all, prepare yourself with such vital pieces of information so that you will write the kind of content that will perfectly resonate with your audience.

Similarly, you have to ensure that your content is written for real human beings to enjoy and not for search engines. In as much as you want your website to rank high on search engines, you don’t have to be “artificial” about it. Else, engines will easily find you out and give you the opposite of what you crave. Your content should sound “natural,” simple to understand yet professional and should have substance. Don’t just publish content for the sake of publishing; make sure there is something in it for readers.

The point is that search engines are more interested in user experience and satisfaction more than they are interested in your content. Therefore, if you publish abstruse and empty content that scares readers away, you can be sure that it will have poor SEO performance despite its keyword richness.

• Think Content Promotion

As noted in the last paragraph above, search engines are interested in the number of people who visit your website and how much time they spend consuming your content – that is an indicator that your product/service or content is “good stuff.” For that reason, you want to take intentional steps to draw visitors to your content – that is, content promotion. The more people visitors you can bring to your content, the better chance you stand to improve your website’s SEO performance.

There are different avenues you can take to promote your content. One way is to post a blurb of the content as well as a link leading to the full content on your social media pages and include sharing buttons. Another way is to share a link to the content through email campaigns. Alternatively, you can hire the services of influencer marketers to promote your content. While some of these strategies are free, others are not, but the result will be well worth the effort and expenses if rightly done.  

Keyword Tips to Improve Your SEO Rank

It has been established that keywords can be used to improve on-page SEO as well as content optimisations. Here, we’ll quickly look at some of the tips that will help you to make more effective use of keywords in your content and overall websites optimisation.

• Search for Keywords Using Keyword Research Tools

You probably have an idea of the keywords your prospective visitors are using when searching for your kind of business or content. However, you shouldn’t take it for granted that your assumption is right until you have confirmed it by using a keyword research tool. When you use a keyword research tool, you may be surprised to discover that the keyword you think your prospective customers are using isn’t exactly what they are using.

Even if you’re right with your assumption, a keyword research tool will provide you with other related keywords used by your customers to find you. So, always use keyword research tools to research your keywords before producing your content – there a good number of such tools out there for you to use. 

• Analyse the Possible Keywords

A keyword research tool is likely to give you more than one keyword with their accompanying data. When that happens, you should not be quick to choose your keyword without subjecting the suggested keywords to a proper analysis. Using an analytics tool like Google Analytics will help you to discover how visitors exactly construct their search queries around the keyword you propose to use. This way, you’ll be in a better position to construct excellent page and content titles as well as meta descriptions.

Similarly, you should be careful about the keyword you choose. The temptation is always to go for a keyword with high search volume, as shown by your keyword research results. However, if a keyword is popular, it is likely to be intensely competitive, which means that you may not get a chance to rank high on that keyword. In such a situation, you’ll stand a better chance of ranking high with a keyword that has a lesser search volume.

• Go for Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords, as opposed to exact keywords, refer to lengthier key phrases. For instance, if “audiobooks” is an exact keyword, “audiobooks for kids aged 5” and “audiobook for handicapped kids” are long-tail keywords. While exact keywords are general and more competitive, long-tail keywords are more specific and less competitive. Therefore, you stand a better chance to rank high on search engines by using long-tail keywords that are specific to your kind of business.

• Test Your Keyword on Your Choice Search Engine

You have done your keyword research, and you have decided on the keyword, exact or long-tail, to use, but that is not all. You have to take a step further by searching for your chosen keyword on your preferred search engine – Bing, Google, Yahoo, or any other. That is a way to test how exactly the keyword you have chosen is performing on search engines. It’s also a way to “peep” at your competitors' websites to see the kind of content they have crafted around the keyword. With that, you’ll have a good idea of what to do and what not to do. You may also be able to find content to link to.

• Analyse Competition

While you do your keyword research and subsequently test your choice keyword on a search engine, you should as well take note of who your competitors are. The things to note about them include their size, how long they have been in business, the kind of content or pages they are ranking for – whether product/service pages or blog posts – and more. That will further help you to decide how much chance you have to rank high on the content or page you want to create with the keyword.

If you feel you have no chance, then you might want to do something different. For instance, if you think you may not rank high organically because of the kind of competitors you have, you might want to consider search engine marketing. Paying to rank high will be beneficial, especially if the content you’re proposing to publish is a product or service page.  

Wrapping Up

We have looked at how vital Search Engine Optimisation is to the online visibility of your brand. We have also explored different aspects of SEO and the steps you should take to improve your website’s SEO. However, beyond the SEO improvement strategies so far highlighted, they are other important factors you want to give some special considerations.

Firstly, SEO improvement is, in some ways, a means to an end – you want customers and clients to find your business and purchase your product or services. Therefore, while you work on improving your SEO, you should equally ensure that your products or services are good enough for the people who seek them. That is because your SEO effort will be wasted if your product or service does not hold a strong promise of satisfying consumers. They may get to your sales page but end up not buying.

Secondly, you should regularly take stock of your SEO effort. With the help of analytics tools, you should analyse your SEO improvement efforts in line with set goals. That will help you to know if your efforts are yielding the expected results. If it is not, then you have to consider other approaches because there is no use of spending so much time on SEO without achieving any result. In essence, there is no such thing as SEO for SEO’s sake!

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