Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, optimizing your local SEO so that small businesses are able to market themselves better has become extremely important.
Some businesses have also found that the cost of Facebook Advertising has reduced during this pandemic, and have shifted their focus to digital marketing. However, one strategy that is less talked about during this time is local SEO.
One way that would allow your business to incorporate a local SEO strategy into your overall digital marketing strategy is to ensure that you have a Google My Business listing being setup for your business.
When a business starts appearing in a Google My Business listing, it also helps your business to stand out and ultimately, acquire more sales.
In this article, we break down 3 steps you could use to start improving your business’s local SEO strategy.
Step 1: Getting your customers to leave reviews on your Google My Business Listing
Most business owners know that having a Google My Business listing is important, but they have no idea that acquiring reviews on their listing would improve their ability to show up on the Google Maps listings.
By having more reviews on your Google My Business listing, it gives Google the signal that your business should rank higher on the Google Maps listing, since it is being favoured by users.
Be sure to ask a customer to leave a review after you have served them.
Additionally, make sure you reply to their review on Google, as this ensures that Google understands that your business is active on their platform. Once again, this favours you to rank higher on the search results.
Step 2: Make sure that your Google My Business profile has at least 3 team photos, 3 exterior photos and 3 interior photos
By uploading photos on your Google My Business profile, it helps Google to understand that your business is real and authentic. Once again, this gives Google the signal that you are a real business. Besides, this allows visitors who search for your brand name to look at your business, to identify how it looks like from the exterior and the interior.
Additionally, make sure that your Google My Business profile has the correct primary category being selected for your business, along with any secondary categories (if there are any).
For instance, If you are a restaurant, make sure that you select restaurant as the main category under your Google My Business Profile.
Step 3: Ensure that you update your Google My Business regularly with new posts
According to research, posting on Google My Business once every 7 days help to improve your rankings on your local SEO strategy.
Somehow, Google favours businesses that use Google products regularly.
As such, providing an update on your business every 7 days does help improve your overall rankings when it comes to local SEO.
In conclusion, improving your overall local SEO strategy might be one good way to tide through the pandemic. However, many businesses have also seen success when utilizing a local SEO strategy together with an SEM strategy. If you would like to find out more on the pros and cons of both SEO and SEM, be sure to check out this article here.
It’s a very exciting and informative post,u nailed it Klaus .