Customer acquisition and loyalty are the two most important factors for any business owner. Being able to execute both properly will enable you to further grow your business by expanding into other markets and maximizing profit margins.
More specifically, utilizing the digital marketing landscape to your advantage, especially local SEO tactics are what will help foster your ability to ‘be where your customers are’. For instance, here’s a graph by Moz that shows the breakdown of weighting factors within local SEO campaigns:
That said, here are 6 ways you can use local SEO to drive more business sales…
1) On-Page Optimization
Ensuring you have tags in the right place and that you do not have any duplicate content will be key here.
- Title Tags – Include your geographical location and primary keyword within your title tag.
- H1 – Make sure your primary keyword is also included here.
- Meta-Description – Be descriptive about what each page on your website is about and include the geographical location as well. This will entice searchers to click on your site over others within search results.
- Alt-Tag – Include items such as the title of the image, description and of course the alt-tag. Doing so will help your images rank higher in search results.
- Site Speed – Another ranking signal is your site speed. Leverage Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see improvements you can make today.
- Duplicate Content – Get rid of any duplicate tags and content on your website. Doing so will help you ensure that none of the pages on your site are competing with one another other and will be easier for search engines to determine certain themes of each page on your site and rank them accordingly.
2) Dedicated Landing Pages
Creating specific landing pages dedicated to certain products or services that you provide including all of the necessary tags will help. For instance, make sure that each of these landing pages have their own geographical location and main keyword that are linked to their corresponding Google My Business listing.
3) Build Local Citations
Local citation is any mention of a local business out on the web, with or without a link. Here are a few things that citations help with:
- Businesses with a greater number of citations tend to rank higher than businesses with fewer citations.
- Citations validate that a business is a part of a community so being written about in a local online newspaper or popular blog will be helpful.
- Increase your local search rankings, which means you have a higher potential of driving targeted traffic, leads and sales.
4) Amazing Content
Developing great content that ranges anywhere from social media posts to blogging and having educational guides and checklists will help you better engage your target/existing customers. Long have passed the days of just direct selling website visitors without providing them with informational or educational content that further builds trust and authority within your niche.
That said, here are 11 content marketing tools you should check out and 7 content marketing ideas to help you acquire customers.
5) Get Positive Reviews
Nothing drive sales quicker than having positive reviews and testimonials about your products/services. Make time to acquire these reviews and share them out via your social media profiles and your website. More specifically,
- 97% of consumers say they read reviews about local businesses.
- 90% of consumers say positive reviews influenced their purchase decision.
- 82% of users visit review sites (e.g. BBB, Yelp, Angie’s List, etc.).
Final Thoughts
The goal of local SEO shouldn’t be about dominating search results, but ensuring that you’re easily found when your target customers are searching for you. Having an online presence means that you position your company in such a way that generating website traffic, leads and sales all foster your revenue objectives.
