Are you usually in a constant worry regarding your local business website so that it could appear in the search engine results? Then writing a blog can prove an effective tool for building an online presence. Regularly maintained blogs provide excellent platforms for exchanging ideas and sharing experiences. It is even more important for the businesses that largely rely on online operations.
Apart from online businesses, it is also pertinent for the local businesses to focus on maintaining blogs. Katelyn McDonald, a crowd content writing expert, crisply sums it as “Blog writing is a great way to showcase your brand’s approachability, expertise and understanding of your niche market.” That being said, local SEO strategies are a key to effectively optimize the essential parts of the website with which the prospects of faring in local search results are increased.
How Regular Blogging Helps Local Business’s SEO?
To begin with, if the regular blog entries are written, chances are that you will come across timely news items and events. Google is always on the lookout for fresh content and maintaining the blogs will certainly attract its attention. It will result more and more human visitors and then a user interaction will start. Therefore, this improved human interaction will enhance the prominence score in Google local algorithms. If you have a fairly active bog, then you can get an opportunity to interact with not just visitors but you can also create a linkage to other bloggers and comment on their blogs at the same time. Moreover, a proper incorporation of marketing tips by Chris Silver Smith on SearchEngineLand.com can benefit the local businesses significantly.
The following three points will help you get started:
- Take Note of Your Local Audience
Today, it is really a challenging task to compete in the field of search engine optimization, especially for the local businesses. Even if you write a compelling blog, it is suffice to maintain it only when viewers could find it. Therefore, at the outset, it is always recommended that you must know as to who your audience is. If you write content and cater it to the local audience, then you must choose certain locally relevant topics. It will be more effective if you schedule your blog posting and synchronize it whenever your viewers want to read it.
- Extend the List of Your Keywords for Making it More Attentive
In order to rank well in the local searches is extremely important for the success of your local business and blogs are something that provides you a great opportunity to improve your keyword position. To target your customers, you can use your product or services in your blog when developing an SEO strategy. So, it is all the more important that the keyword density be maintained with Meta tags and content. Keywords are the crucial means for users so that they reach to your blogs. You need to generate more opportunities for the potential customers, so the business should mention the name of your country, neighboring cities so on and so forth.
- Do not Forget to Write About Local Events
Describing the local events is not just helpful for local SEO, but it also goes on to project you as someone who has a deep respect for the community. It also enhances the credibility of your business. Examples of local events are impending elections; different community events etc. people pay a lot of attention when you provide qualitative content as well as useful information to them.
Important Steps for Setting up Effective Blog for Local SEO
- Use platforms like WordPress that allow you various installation options and avoid the topics that are hard to customize.
- The blog should be integrated as part of the existing site.
- Incorporating authorship markup will help in making blog posts of your website more assuring for the readers. It is done with the help of author tag markup.
- Incorporating SEO research by targeting future blog articles with effective keyword combinations will be greatly helpful.
- Frequent posting of blogs is very crucial and helps a lot.
- Starting of a blog conversation at this point in time will allow you to share thoughts with other bloggers. The forward and backward linking will increase the overall interaction. So, in this way more and more people will interact with you online.
- Prepare a calendar for the content, which will remind you what seasonal topics related to your business are posted.
- Keep your blogs brief, concise and informative. Readers usually do not have enough time to go through all what has been written. Therefore, it is pertinent that the information is crisp, succinct and easily understood.
Three Important Areas that Boost Your Local Search
- On Page NAP
It requires you to set up name, address and phone number (NAP) because it is relatively easy for people and search engine to find you. After that location pages must be created, which will contain descriptions, information and promotions etc. Finally, it is recommended that locally relevant information be published such as local industry gatherings and you also need to use Schema.org markup on your NAP to give the search engines all they need to display your company information correctly.
Here’s the code that you can adapt to your own website for company information:
- Local Profile Pages
- Create a local Google+ page for your business. Link different locations with it.
- Replace plagiarized listings with the help of Google Mapmaker. But do not dilute reviews and links listed in local Google+ pages.
- Create a platform to build customer reviews and the process should be easy for them. It is important to understand that local Google + reviews help gaining stars.
- The different business categories should be optimized. At least 4 -5 categories should be added in relation to your business.
- Inbound Links and Citations
The inbound links are the ones that get diverted from other domains to your site. Whereas, citations are the descriptions of your business on other sites, so, the following steps will increase your chances of receiving citations and inbound links:
- You need to verify as to how consistent is your business address on the web
- Build directory citations
- Gain local links
Page Load Optimization
Do you know how page loading speed impacts on Google search engines ranking? Google has indicated that website loading speed is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages therefore we must use advanced JS/CSS minification options to improve website loading time for desktop and mobile users and get higher score in Google PageSpeed Insights.
Conclusion
As we just discussed as to how local SEO is so beneficial for local businesses; are you, for one, ready to grab this opportunity for the simple practical reasons? Google shows so favoritism towards those companies which lack innovations or are just too cagey to think out of the box. These few tips are selectively extracted from the contemporary SEO techniques. SEO is all about visibility, hard work and an honest outreach to the people who really want to get advantage from the ever growing digital platform.