With more businesses online now than ever before, local SEO has become a critical factor for helping businesses be seen by their community and gain more customers.
To become more competitive, local SEO consultants encourage business owners to adopt digital marketing strategies that focus not just on general optimization but on local SEO to weigh their efforts in the right direction.
With 2023 right around the corner and many businesses beginning to evaluate their marketing successes and failures for this year, local SEO companies point out some effective tips for improving local marketing impact in the next one.
- Google My Business and Google Maps - One of the most useful and important tools to improve a company’s local SEO is its Google My Business page which can be claimed for free. GMB pages provide a second optimized website for any business and a place to interact with customers via search, reviews and more. This page is directly tied to Google Maps and when properly utilized and optimized, local SEO consultants find that GMB pages are essential for helping businesses not only show up on Google Maps but also to claim a position in the coveted 3-Pack of recommendations to searchers.
- Mobile And Voice Optimization of Websites - Websites are still important even when utilizing a GMB page and these days, it is critical that business websites be mobile optimized for user-friendliness and good SEO as well as voice search, which more people are using every day.
- Online Reputation Management - One of the keys to successful local SEO is reputation building and management via reviews and engagement. Nearly 90% of consumers refer to online reviews before making a purchase, so it is critical that local businesses maintain a good online reputation within their community.
- Video Content - Video content in a wide variety of forms is becoming more popular than ever. Therefore, local SEO companies encourage businesses to invest in the creation of short and longer-form videos, reels, shorts, and video advertising to get more views when their videos and ads show up in the search results on Google, social media, and elsewhere.
- Search Intent - Understanding why a searcher is searching and what information they are looking for is another way that businesses can be more seen in their local search results. FAQ pages and other content that answers more of the potential questions a user is likely to ask funnels more searchers to their website according to local SEO consultants.
Local SEO is somewhat different than general SEO, in that it focuses on finding the best ways to be seen by a community as opposed to the whole world.
Using tools that focus on location, reputation, intent, and user-friendliness, local SEO companies can help small businesses rise to the top of the SERPs and be more successful in 2023 against competitive businesses right in their neighborhood.