Local SEO For a Small Business can make or break your year. What 3 Tips Will I give you for local SEO success in 2020?
Flavio is a blogger whom just completed 2 years of blogging. He wrote a blog post every single day for 2 years.
When he was asked about the need for SEO, He commented “Do not worry about SEO. If you read the internet for ways to get more readers to your blog, you will find that SEO is one of the things often mentioned. Most of the time you will see people talking about keywords, and keywords tools. I have a confession to make: I never used a keyword tool. I do not currently use one, and I find that just thinking about it bores me.”
More than 11 million people visited his blog in 2 years, 90% of which just in the last 12 months. 1 million visitors every month is a lot of people.
The lesson is not to think of SEO as just Keyword stuffing and manipulating the search engines. Think of it as a way of helping potential customers and winning them over because of your unique qualities and friendly warm attitude. That’s SEO on a whole new level and that’s why the 3 things I look at today are going to change your perception for the better.
This article will take a look at:
- Communication to benefit local seo
- Local SEO through google My Business
- How Google My Business can be claimed and authenticated for your small business
- Why branding is very relevant to local seo
Video: Local SEO : Small Business Tips For 2020
Timestamps for the video above
- 0:00 Introduction to local seo
- 0:30 How this tutorial works
- 0:40 Is local SEO important?
- 1:00 Keyword research not important according to one blogger
- 1:40 Local SEO point 1: Communication
- 2:00 Communication is essential to do business
- 2:45 Adding chat bots for local seo communication
- 3:00 other communication ideas for local seo
- 3:30 Videos and coffee shops helps build local trust
- 4:10 Rich snippets VIDEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxmtX…
- 4:40 Local SEO point 2: Google My Business
- 5:00 Local guides have been adding local info
- 5:20 Many are unclaimed business on GMB
- 5:40 How to claim your business
- 6:00 Authenticate your Google My Business
- 6:25 Google My Business for beginners
- 6:30 Local SEO point 3: Branding
- 7:00 Branding examples and ideas for 2020
- 8:50 Branding for 2020 VIDEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQja…
Communication to benefit local seo
I’m noticing that helping and communicating potential clients seems to be a real focus for this year. Why does it work for your business when it’s not specifically SEO?
Well helping potential clients is helping them trust you. So its optimisation in a whole new way. Using chat bots on the website along with social media and really useful videos, snippets and blogs, you want to become a go to person for your service or product.
That type of treatment will bring in great reviews and genuine recommendations. Local clients have the added benefit of meeting up for a coffee. It’s the meeting in person that will really help develop real-world community and loyalty.
If potential customers can easily contact you then there confidence will build when they commit to a sale or purchase with your business.
- Chatbots
- Videos snippets
- Social media
- Coffee
All the above should be part of your communication system in one variant or other. Though some of us are better at one are than another, all to some degree are needed in balance.
Local SEO through google My Business
Google My Business has been designed to get every business customised. It wants local visitors to pick up there phones and ask Google for the nearest shop service or business. I guess you only have one way to go, if you can’t beat them, join them.
To take advantage of getting in the local listings, the least you can do is claim your business, then make sure it’s full of accurate details, then finally furnish it with attractive offers and helpful photos. If you communicated well, then you can also ask for some positive reviews from your previous customers.
Google also loves rich snippets and FAQs this year to expand your web site visibility in the search engine results.
Contacting Google My Business Support Team Directly
Communication Branding and GMB are all important. Strangely enough you cant fault Googles branding. But you can fault its communication. Its very difficult to contact Google when things go wrong, so you may find this useful. If you want to resolve some common errors directly with Google My Business, the quickest and most effective way I’ve found is to communicate with them on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/googlemybusiness) by either posting on their wall or messaging the page directly, or you can Tweet them or direct message them on Twitter using https://twitter.com/googlemybiz
Why branding is very relevant to local seo
You may notice branding is having an increased value in many of the analytics used by various social media platforms, consoles, video platforms and search engines. Local business branding is now much more logical. In the past, branding was no more than a shop front sign or a business card with a logo. But now with mobile websites, affordable logo design, the ease of printing wraps on Van’s, your own printed headed paper, invoicing software and social media icons, branding is so easy and effective on a tiny budget.
You can very quickly improve the perception of your company if you keep it simple and regular. So local SEO is much more about perception through branding than we have ever known. Combined with a good online presence and communication and you have a very powerful formula.
Conclusion
Local SEO requires several qualities, but as seen in my video interview above I have picked 3 big winners for any small business. Communication is essential to do business with local clients. They know where you live and you cant survive without good communication, so adding chat bots for your website is very much the current thinking in web design. But communication can also include videos, emails, texts and coffee shops.
Never underestimate the need for Google My Business . With Google empowering local guides adding local information, no business is safe from edits!
With so many unclaimed business on GMB its about time you claimed your business.
Finally we also looked at the way local SEO is benefiting from strong branding
I hope this guide and video proved useful to you. Please feel free to leave a comment and let me know if you have any questions.