Many small businesses serve limited areas. That being the case, if your enterprise exclusively caters to a specific state, city or township, this should be reflected in your search engine optimization (SEO) endeavors. Attempting to reach a national – or intentional – audience is both a waste of time and a needless uphill battle.
Conversely, focusing your SEO efforts on local clientele is much easier and far more likely to bear fruit. Small businesses looking to connect with a local audience would do well to heed the following pointers.
Work with Professional SEO Services
If your business is relatively new to search engine optimization or your existing SEO efforts could use some fresh energy, you’d be wise to reach out to professional SEO services. The right SEO service will be able to craft a workable search engine optimization strategy that’s uniquely tailored to your specific enterprise.
Whether you’re looking for assistance with content creation, keyword integration or any other SEO-adjacent endeavor, these services can be invaluable allies. As an added bonus, most SEO services provide assistance with other types of web marketing.
So, if your enterprise could use some help with social media, audience engagement, link building or any other digital promotional effort, use this opportunity to get a professional opinion on your current strategies.
Create Locally Focused Web Content
If a local audience is what you’re after, you’ll be well-serve by locally focus web content. When crafting feature articles or blog posts, make an effort to tailor the content to appeal to clients based in the area you serve.
However, in order to keep this content relevant and avoid drawing the ire of popular search engines, make sure the local issues you cover relate to your specific business and/or industry. Content that only loosely ties into your business and focuses more on local happenings is unlikely to make a splash with your audience or curry favor with search engines.
Utilize Locally Relevant Keywords
Keyword integration plays a large role in the creation of search engine-focused content. So, when composing new content, take care to include locally relevant keywords. For example, a website design company could use something along the lines of “best website design in Milwaukee, WI.” Similarly, a restaurant might find success with “good food in Syracuse, NY.” When integrating keywords into your content, make a point of avoiding keyword stuffing.
Not only does this give content an inauthentic, manufactured feel, it can also earn you penalties from prominent search engines. Additionally, your target audience is unlikely to derive any value from content that’s littered with keywords. To nip this in the bud, make a point of only using keywords in a natural, organic fashion.
When keywords are unnaturally wedge into content, it’s generally pretty obvious to readers, and if people get the impression that you’re more concern with selling them something than providing them with useful information, they’re unlikely to connect with your posts.
Provide it’s not caught by search engines, keyword stuffing may help attract new visitors to your site, but if the first thing they see is keyword-littered content, they probably won’t stick around.
Create a Google My Business Account
Since phone books are quickly becoming a relic of the past, it behooves small businesses to focus on prominent online directories. This is where Google My Business enters the equation. Not only is creating an account for your enterprise on this popular directory incredibly simple, it can also pave the way for some major perks.
For starters, having a Google My Business account significantly increases your chances of showing up on Google Maps searches.
Secondly, an account makes it more likely that your business will come up in local searches and receive a higher search ranking.
Localize Seo Efforts
There’s no sense in attempting to reach a broader audience if your business is unable to serve them. As such, small businesses whose focus is exclusively on the locales in which they’re based would do well to localize their SEO efforts. Not only will this make search engine optimization much easier, it will also lead to a greater degree of SEO success.
So, if reaching a local audience is your primary SEO goal, there’s no time like the present to start employing the measures discussed above.