Local Business SEO

What is Local Business SEO?

Local business SEO is a term used to describe techniques that businesses use to drive organic traffic to their business’s webpage or google business profile. These techniques are important for business owners to know in order to maximize their business traffic while also minimizing their advertising spend.

SEO vs Local SEO

In order to fully understand local SEO, it is important to know what SEO is. SEO is short for search engine optimization, which means changing website content in order for google to like the content more. When Google likes content more than others, it gets listed higher in the organic search results. Ranking higher in search results allows for more traffic to be sent to the business for no additional cost. Now that we know what SEO is, then what is Local SEO? Local SEO is the process of using SEO techniques to help local businesses grow within their respective area. This most commonly is used by small to medium sized businesses that only do business within a specific geographic area. In order for the local business to grow, it must know the techniques used in local SEO. These techniques involve onsite SEO and offsite SEO. For onsite and offsite SEO, we must take a look at a business website. The osite techniques involve changing the title tags, the url slugs, and the meta descriptions, while also assuring the content on the website is unique and not copy/pasted from someplace else. Furthermore, onsite SEO also is about assuring the website is linked to other pages of the website. Each page should be linked to another page, ensuring there is no dead end for the user. A major ranking factor for Google is user experience, so anytime there is an opportunity to make the users experience better/ more efficient, then Google will most likely find that more appealing than another website that is not geared toward user experience. The second technique involved with a business website is offsite SEO. Offsite SEO is everything that has to do with improving the rank of a website without changing anything on the website. Although this may seem contradicting, Google takes highly into account backlinks. Backlinks are links that are made on other websites, where those websites link to your website. Not all backlinks are the same, so therefore there are backlinks that are more valuable than others. Highly reputable websites that link to your business website will be worth more than a link to your website from a non-user friendly website. Offsite SEO is very important when building reputation because when other reputable sites link to you, it is their way of saying “I trust this website.”

How To Use This New Informantion

Your first step in your SEO strategy should be to fully optimize your onsite SEO. The onsite SEO is most important to do first because it allows for a solid framework to build upon later. With your title tags, meta tags and slugs optimized for that page’s keyword, it will allow for your website to start having a better chance to show up in the search results. Once the onsite SEO is done, you should look into producing your own backlinks by creating accounts on reputable websites and providing content with a link in the text. With these techniques used and optimized you will have a great website for your local business with your website showing up in the top ranks of the search results.