If you’re a small business with a brick and mortar store front, it’s important your customers – and prospects – in your local area find your business quickly. It may be a patient looking for physical therapy or someone hankering for a cupcake. In either case, you’ll need to have a website that’s optimized for local SEO (a.k.a. Search Engine Optimization) so you’ll be at the top of the Google or Bing search results page when people search “physical therapists near me” or “cupcake near me“.
Here are six ways to enhance your Local SEO and improve the chances your small business will show up in front of more local customers:
- Create a Google My Business Profile Creating a Google My Business page gives Google all the vital information about your business so you’ll listing will show up in local searches. It’s free and only take a few minutes to set up, so it’s a ‘must have’ for all brick and mortar small businesses.
- Check your NAP information “NAP” stands for Name, Address and Phone number and is the standard information that Google uses to identify your company as a local business. Check anywhere you have your NAP – on your website or in online directories like Yelp, Foursquare or AngiesList – to make sure that it’s exactly the same. This isn’t such a big deal for new companies, but if you’ve ever moved there’s a good chance one of your addresses isn’t up to date.
- Gather Reviews Nowadays, online customer reviews are the first place folks look when checking out your business.
Pro tip: create a review request card and get it printed online at VistaPrint and hand it out to your customers at checkout. It’ll greatly reduce the time and effort it takes to get a review, and good reviews really boost your small business local SEO ranking.
- Have a Mobile-Friendly Site Today, more searches are done on mobile than on desktop. In addition, most customers are actually away from home when they search for local businesses. And since Google factors in your site’s “mobile-friendliness” in their ranking algorithm, it’s a good way to ensure your business will rank high on the search results page.
- Get High Quality Backlinks Backlinks – links from other relevant, high-quality websites – are a great way to boost your site to the top of Google or Bing. You get backlinks by creating awesome content that other people want to share or link to from their website. Alternatively, you can partner with other local businesses and co-author or guest author content for their website.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robbie Moore is the founder of Rushminute, a digital marketing agency in Lincoln, Nebraska. With 20+ years of experience in digital marketing, Robbie has worked with dozens of companies and organizations, large and small, around the globe. He also writes extensively about design, development, and business in general.
