If you are in any type of local business chances are you do not want to compete with the entire country or beyond. You are interested in attracting local customers and clients to your business. Real Estate businesses and agents, restaurants, even the local dry cleaners want to be found on the internet due to the changing marketplace today.
Every day more and more people are accessing the internet via mobile phones and it is important for a local business to be able to compete and change with the times. Putting up a website is the first step and making sure that it is optimized properly to attract local customers is another.
Here are some tips for driving local traffic to your site by using some SEO techniques
- Start by installing Google Analytics to your site for tracking purposes
- Make sure to include City and State when listing your location and contact information on your site
- Include location in your meta descriptions, when appropriate, as well as in the content. Adding it to the footer would insure that it is found on every page of your site
- Include your location and contact information on your site landing pages
- Optimize your site template for Mobile views
- Claim your business on local search engines like Yahoo Local and Google Business, including setting up a Google+ account completely, using proper keywords for your business and location
- Add a separate page to your site for each location you operate with your services or products you offer. Make sure they are optimized with title tags, header tags and optimized content
- Use your Google + and other social media pages for sharing content using keywords
- Add your business to Google Maps and imbed it to your landing page or contact page on your site
- Claim and add your listing and business info to local directories. Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google + rank high in the searches
- Use a Blog function on your site to include articles and info on local events, product info, etc.
- Add images that are properly optimized and share them on social media and in your content
- Encourage reviews of your products on third party sites and your own site
These tips, like any seo optimization project is a work in progress. You can make a difference in the performance of your site in a local market.
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