If people want to have a delicious dinner in a restaurant, they will need to find a local place that best appeals them. When you want to promote your business to the local audience through SEO, here are things that you should do:
- Verify your business in Google My Business: Many businesses don’t have Google My Business account and it means that they don’t take full advantage of Google. If people are looking for a local BBQ restaurant, GMB will show your physical address, hours of operations, phone numbers, photos and reviews. If your business is shown prominently in the local area, it will be mentioned in Local 3-Pack. When your business is included in the top three local listings, it’s more likely to attract clicks and actual buyers.
- Set up a local business profile: Often, when we are searching for a business in Google, nothing is shown. We get no website, address, reviews or photos. This can happen to you if you don’t have a local business profile. You can create accounts in Foursquare, Yellow Pages, Tripadvisor and Yelp. You should give people plenty of opportunities to easily find your business. Don’t forget to focus on local online directories. By having multiple business profiles, it’s more likely that your business will appear in search result. So, when people are looking for your business, a page from TripAdvisor or Foursquare can be displayed.
- Get reviews: Reviews are essentially content as well and they are highly relevant to your business. If you know that you are offering excellent products and services, you shouldn’t hesitate to get reviews. In fact, glowing reviews about your business can boost your SEO performance. Online reviews may make up about ten percent of how major search engine rank your website. You should encourage people to give positive reviews for your website. They can provide reviews in various sites, including social media. You should train your employees to respond to reviews. You should thank customers if they provide glowing and positive reviews. However, if clients are not satisfied and have some complaints, you need to respond immediately. This shows that you really care about customers. If you can generate dozens of new reviews from users each week, it means that you will get plenty of highly relevant content for potential customers to read.
- Add local keywords in title tags: Local keywords can be added into various parts of your content, such as title tags, header tags and content. Title tag is placed inside the HTML document and it specifies your page’s title. So, if your business is offering a plumbing service and you are located in Houston, Texas, then you should modify your page title into something like “Jake’s Plumbing Service – Houston”. So, when someone in Houston is looking for a plumbing service, then it’s more likely that your business is displayed. In fact, it’s not sensible to promote your business globally, if you are operating locally. Combined with entry from Google My Business, your local business can be represented more prominently in Google.
