If for some reason, you decide not to utilize content marketing to drive traffic to your website, you may want to consider putting focus on local SEO. There are techniques you can use to succeed.

You could potentially switch your focus towards usability and building a community. At the end of the day though, it still may benefit you to utilize both efforts.

TRY THESE STRATEGIES TO ATTAIN HIGH RANKINGS IN LOCAL SEARCH:

  1. Consider building a community. If you are good at bringing people together, you could create a forum or focus your social media presence around the needs of your prospective customers. As the community grows, you can then direct your audience to specific offers.
  2. Use a brandable domain. Looking back a few years, everyone tried building their websites on domain names that were an exact matched to their keywords. It worked for a while, and you could rank websites near the top of the search engines with very little effort.
    Nowadays, things have changed. Brandable domains are making leadway. Creating a brand brings a unique presence to your business and is essential when attempting to rank locally.

OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE

  1. Make your site intuitive and responsive. Even with all the free site builders available today, many local businesses still have poor websites. With that said, sometimes it may be best to just pay an expert to create your website while you focus on your expertise.
    To ensure that your website works on all devices, you’ll want it to be responsive. Most web traffic nowadays come from mobile devices, so it’s a must that your website is mobile-friendly in addition to desktops.
  2. Use on-page SEO. To rank highly, it’s important to optimize your website. Ensure that each page on your website is optimized with a title, heading tags, and properly labeled images. Choose keywords that are appropriate for your website. When choosing keywords, you will also want to research keywords to find the ones that are getting good queries and has the lowest competition possible.Don’t stress about ranking globally. Instead, focus on adding local place names. E.g. “restaurants in Myrtle Beach” instead of “restaurants.”
  3. Optimize your website load time. Many fail to address website loading time. The time it takes your site to load is an important ranking factor. If your site loads too slow, users will click away quickly, creating a high bounce rate to your site. High bounce rates have a negative impact on your SEO efforts.

UTILIZE CITATIONS AND GOOGLE MY BUSINESS

  1. Get verified on Google My Business. In order for your business to appear on Google Maps, you must verify it with Google My Business. Once completed, your business will stand a better chance at appearing on first-page search results.
  2. Build local citations. Citations are a list of business names, addresses, and phone numbers on the web. They help boost your visibility on Google Maps and local search results. The more citations your website has, the better your website may perform. Something important you should also remember is to be consistent across all your listings. Inconsistencies may harm your overall visibility.
  3. Get reviews from your customers. Encourage your customers to give reviews about your products or services. Better yet, give awesome services along with awesome products, and you won’t have to do much encouraging. Your customers will be raving to leave you a review. Reviews help build trust in search engines as well as with the general public.

IF YOUR GOAL IS TO SUCCEED AT LOCAL SEO, YOU WON’T HAVE TO PUT MUCH ATTENTION ON CONTENT MARKETING.

Focusing on these local SEO techniques, you may be able to beat out your competitors who invests much in content. As an added bonus, your site should eventually start to move up in organic ranking as well.

How does your business look across local search directories? Run our scan tool to find out. Click or tap the banner below.

Founder and Principal of Davis Marketing Solutions LLC, digital marketing and web design company in Myrtle Beach, SC.

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