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Does a full-out SEO strategy make sense for my local business?
Posted by on May 29, 2020 at 4:45 pmHello Friends!
I work at a small, local company. We definitely want to rank high for local search , so we see the value of having a local SEO strategy.
But does it make sense for us to also invest in a traditional SEO strategy?
My understanding is that a traditional SEO strategy is focused on improving your site’s visibility on a national or international scale. Does this make sense for my company if only local customers convert? How much can or does a traditional SEO strategy impact local search results?
If we had unlimited time and resources, I’d be all for a traditional SEO strategy. I understand that more traffic, backlinks, etc. to my site generates from relevant/valuable content is beneficial.
But my company has to be very strategic about where we spend our time since our resources are limited. I’d hate to spend the time writing a beautiful SEO-optimized blog on dog grooming, for example, if that effort won’t impact my SERP ranking when someone in my area searches for “dog grooming near me.”
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
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11 Replies
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Local SEO and by that we mean Google My Business relies heavily on links from local directories and citations within the site.
Also Local Schema helps alot but everything needs to match [eg NAP]​
Hope it helps
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“Traditional” SEO will help with your local (and the local will help with your traditional). For the traditional side, you want to focus on keywords like “Dog Grooming Melbourne” as opposed to “Dog Grooming”.
u/Viper2014 basically hit the nail on the head for local. If you don’t know NAP = Name, Address, Phone number. This needs to be the same EVERYWHERE the business appears on the internet.
I’d also look at optimizing your Yelp & anything else you can (ex: TripAdvisor) to rank for your keywords too. Those pages will likely rank more quickly with less effort, and you’ll get a bonus of traffic from those search engines too.
And of course, VIDEO VIDEO VIDEO. Video works great on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and ranks easily in Google.
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You have to work on your website’s page speed , UX UI and other issues such as schema markup and internal linking. then you have to do a lot of classifieds and local business listing. if you start writing blog , this will really help you to get good rankings.
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If you are local website, you should ask the expert to help improve your Google Map listings, local keyword rankings, and more. The strategy may be different for some things, but other elements like competitor research, keyword research, fixing technical errors, and more will be the same regardless how big your reach needs to be.
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Buy yourself a Yext subscription and make sure your Google My Business, website, and Yext profile all have the same Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) and that would be good enough to give you a boost without a full-blown strategy around content marketing, SEO, and more.
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It would depend greatly on your objectives/goals. I would agree that a traditiona, full-outl SEO strategy tends to be focused more on improving a site’s visibility nationally or internationally (or at least non-geographically specific). As a result the visits you get from a traditional approach tend to be people seeking information, using queries such as “why is my car making that noise when I stop”, rather than solutions or services where visitors might use queries such as “brake repair chicago” . The benefit is that by providing an experience to users that offers an answer to their question, and you’re more likely to be seen as an expert/authority. Once you gain the trust and admiration of other websites and marketers, there’s an increased likelihood that they’ll provide your website a citation (i.e. link to your website, using relevant anchor text if you’re lucky). That influences organic ranking.
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One might argue that these are one in the same. Technically sound on-page SEO should be focused on your products and services.
If your business is global (or at least national) then you focus on building the best possible content, links, citations, and search responsive content for your services or product.
If your business does most of it’s business in the local market – then you focus on building the best possible content, links, citations, and search responsive content for your services or product, while ensuring your market is represented in that content.
Local practices are really additions to the work that should be done anyway – no?
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Yes, SEO efforts at the local level is where it’s at right now. Especially now due to covid people feel extremely limited. Directory listings, free classified listing searches and even low cost classified listings, Facebook marketplace, facebook business page, instagram brand awareness campaigns, and optimizing your google my business with images, and even article links as appropriate (yes that can still be done) do it.
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Depends. Try and get in the maps by yourself, and try and do it without hiring a consultant first.
If you need help to do it yourself, let me know, and I can mentor you.
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You still need backlinks to rank locally. You will just use different anchors and add your location in the articles, so that Google understands that you are a local service.
If you have no idea where to start then check out **Rankd_SEO backlink database**. There are step-by-step guides with screenshots on how to build backlinks on hundreds of high-authority websites.
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Local seo……
Keywords and content are king.
Create a budget for locally targeted Google AdWords and get your listings up high. Ask for Yelp and Google reviews to help boost the visual appeal of your Organic search results.
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