How Does Local SEO for Small Business Work?

There’s no denying that if you’re a local business owner just starting, you’re looking for every nook and cranny to make your business more discoverable in every sense, including on search engines. For your business to appear directly towards your target audience, you will need to employ search engine optimisation or commonly known as SEO. With a small local business, you would need to use local SEO.

What is Local SEO?

To improve a business’s visibility on Google SERP, local SEO is used to reach a geo-specific target audience. Local SEO for small business serves more efficiently when your company has a physical location and caters to a particular area with a local audience.

While similar to SEO, local SEO differs by including certain elements that make your business rank in local searches.

Who needs Local SEO?

Well, suppose your business is small and just starting out, and you need to attract more customers from your surrounding area. In that case, local SEO helps improve your online visibility, thus increasing your physical sales.

How to improve your business visibility with local SEO efforts?

Localise your website

Many small businesses fail to recognise the importance of having an informational and user-friendly website. A conscious consumer first does before purchasing a product is browsing through the business website. As a business owner, you should ensure proper contact details, the “About Us” section, online directories and the homepage on your website.

Once the NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) is completed, ensure that those details are consistent everywhere on the website and social media pages. Once there, ensure that you add schema markup, structured data that helps Google decide whether your business is relevant for a search query.

While you’re there, why not complete the Google My Business listing page to verify your website. By doing this, users performing local searches can easily find your website and featured products as well as any current promotions you intend to run.

Optimise Your Content

When focusing on a targeted area for local businesses, try to optimise local keywords. Try using “target keyword + location” to gain more local search results on your website. For example, try adding “hair saloon KL” to increase user visibility in your intended target area.

As you optimise the content, optimise the title tags and meta descriptions with these localised keywords. You could also produce semantic variations of those targeted local keywords to optimise your static text and blog content.

An increase in local SEO strategy leads to an increase in local customers!

Optimise social media and customer reviews

Speaking from a consumer’s perspective once again, once checking out the business website, potential customers also will have a look at the reviews for your business establishment. These reviews either appear on your social media pages or local search results for your business in the form of local citations.

To gain your customer’s trust, you can start by posting honest reviews and testimonials on your website. Once registered for Google My Business, Google reviews given by your customers will significantly impact your website as those are the first reviews users come across in local search results.

As a business owner, you can encourage your customers to add reviews on the Google My Business listing but NOT to force them to do so. Certain businesses opt to force their customers for reviews, which makes those reviews seem disingenuous and spammy, thus leading to the account suspension by Google.

Hire SEO experts

If you’re just starting out your business, performing local SEO for small business might be a tad bit overwhelming. This is why you should opt to hire digital marketing agencies equipped with SEO experts and ready to perform local SEO services.

Here’s where Primal Digital Agency Malaysia comes in! We guarantee higher local SEO traffic in 90 days, as well as strategies to improve your website’s Google ranking. Visit our website today and let our experts help you navigate the SEO landscape and achieve maximum results.