If you are a local business seeking new customers, Google is your solution. Receiving thousands of queries each second, you better play by the rules if you’re going to be successful in the online world.
Luckily for you, Google made this a lot easier in 2015, when they changed the way they list local businesses. Now, providing your business address is on your website and social profiles, Google can find you and show your results to local people.
Below are our top reasons for helping your local business to rank higher on Google.
Make Sure Google Knows Your Address
As we touched on briefly in the introduction, it’s important that your address is posted on every platform you are listed on, and you should update each page if you change address.
Brent Payne, the director of SEO for Tribune Company, suggests adding the physical address of your business onto the footer of each webpage on your site. “This makes Google see your address more often and as a result, you should rank higher in a local search,” he says.
By embedding your location on your contact page, Google can be certain you are located at the address stated on your website.
Get Listed On Local Business Directories
Listing your business on local based listing services such as Yocale means customers are more likely to find you when searching since all local businesses are put together. This, in turn, helps your own website rank higher, as well as bringing you more traffic.
Google Places is Google’s free-to-use local business directory. According to Brent Payne, around 10 percent of local business in the US have claimed their Google Places listing” but those that do are “instantly beating 90 percent of the competition.”
You can claim your listing by verifying that you are the business owner and typing in the PIN number Google will send to a secure contact number.
Fill Your Site With Relevant Content
The content on your site is an extremely important ranking factor for search engine optimization (SEO) and the more content you have, the more Google will favour your business. Relevant content should include outbound and internal links that are relevant to content, as well as keywords.
Keywords are essentially what users would type into Google to find you. So if someone was looking to find a nail salon in Toronto, you would want to use the key phrase, “Toronto nail salon.”
Keywords should be used at least twice in content, if not more, and can be included in title tags of web pages, or as the caption of an image, for example.
Promote Your Website On Social Media
As we mentioned above, inbound and outbound links both affect the ranking of your site. Promoting your site on social media and sharing content will encourage external sites to link to your content, thereby giving you better results on Google.
The number of connections or followers you have on social media will also affect how you rank in Google, but be warned that fake followers don’t count. Google can detect the quality of your followers, so buying thousands of them won’t change your ranking.
To increase the number of followers you have on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, you can do things like making sure images are optimized for greater engagement, more retweets and more clicks.