How to Boost Your Local Search Rankings
The Australian market is ruthless as its wildlife. Any enterprise or business endeavour faces top-notch competition where the slightest advantage can make or break your chance of succeeding. SEO comes into play to help your business become visible and have a chance of succeeding. As the old joke goes, the best place to hide a dead body is on the second page of a Google search. So, if your business is not front and centre, it might as well be dead in the waters or soon to be. We are here to share some of the best tips&tricks to avoid that and without further ado, let’s start!
1. The basics
Your NAP information gets you a spot on the map. Name, Address and phone, gets your business on your customer’s radars and provide means of contact. These are the bare necessities required for your customers to find you. Yes, we agree that such trivialities may seem mundane, but you would be surprised how often companies don’t provide accurate info or forget. These basics become paramount when you move as they need to be updated. Any misinformation leads to customer frustration and loss of revenue due to basic info.
2. Think global, act local
Casting a wide net on the worldwide internet produces only hot air. While the numbers may be high, you won’t have much use for them as customers from across the globe can’t contribute to your profit margins. Learning what works on a large scale and then applying it to your local strategies is how you get people in stores and sales. Because your business needs to appear on Google, you need to learn how to cooperate. Making a Google My Business account for your enterprise is the logical first step.
Then, you can use that asset to promote on a local scale. You don’t need worldwide searches and results from people in no position to come to you. What you want to aim for, is for your local and nearby residents to find you. While local searches will dwarf global ones in numbers, the profit margins of local supporters will always outweigh others.
3. Friendly cooperation
Going hand in hand and reaching out to other local businesses reduces competition, forms strong business contacts and eases market penetration. Finding other companies that make products that can be symbiotic with yours and offering an alliance will multiply the results for both. The goal for everyone is to reduce competition in the market, and such actions are possible by joining up. Your company may not be able to do everything required for success on its own.
Outsourcing is key to anything you may deem too much for your enterprise. Trained and experienced companies that can solve any problem, will grant you greater results than tackling those problems on your own. SEO on its own can be difficult to build from the ground up and maintain, so finding good help like Green Web Marketing, gets you further along. Either forming alliances or outsourcing gets you further along and on the map.
4. Social media
Where are your future customers? On different social media and it’s your job to find where. Think of each social media platform as a separate market. There are so many of them, and each is made for a specific type of demographic. By doing your research, you can present yourself as the ideal one for you and start reaching out to like-minded people. Any business has to make digital traction and noise to get noticed, but the key to success here is to make the right noise at the correct spot. And finding out which social platform your users flock to will let you target that niche. Information is key to any victory.
5. Online reviews
Online reviews are an extension of your digital noise and footprint. Interacting with your local area of customers comes in many ways, but the best one is via online reviews. Good or bad, each presents an opportunity to capitalise on. Don’t ignore bad reviews as you have to take your time and patience with them. Each can reveal an area you can improve on. Not ignoring opinions forms a good business image and lets everyone know you are proactive.
Good reviews are easier, of course, and you only need not forget to respond to them. People like to be praised and noticed. Affection shown by your company won’t be forgotten and is used to build brand recognition. The more reviews you get the better, as they make your online profile look better. When someone searches for your company and sees glowing reviews, with plenty of interaction, they are more likely to opt for that choice.
6. The internet is mobile
Over 80% of all searches are done via mobile today. Everyone has one, and not comforting to mobile devices will result in lower ratings, SEO positioning and loss of revenue, by extension. Mobile SEO is a different beast than its Desktop counterpart. Optimising your page for mobile ensures it gets preferential treatment. Then, once your users discover it, a good mobile page makes it easier to navigate and use.
Customers and Google love easy-to-use mobile pages, and going out of your way to design for one is the right move. When designing or making any decision about your company, always start with you as an example. Would you do business or trouble yourself with a poorly designed website on your phone? Of course not, and neither would your users.
Realising the importance of securing a local market and building a strong user base for future operations, is how you kick-start your business. Expanding and branching out is great for any business. But to get to that point, you need to secure your foothold on the local market. Think of your local market as the testing ground for your enterprise. If you succeed locally, you can use all that knowledge when expanding worldwide. You will also have a strong customer base which provides the means for future planning and investments. Any change you make towards a such goal is certainly better than none. We wish you all the best.