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Local Business

Get Found By Your Customers

Following this strategy will help you design and optimize your web presence to attract more customers who are searching locally.  In it, we discuss which key elements to prioritize so your business will rank higher on local searches.  This strategy drives to improve on principles proven by data to increase your business’s visibility.

Table of Contents

Overview

Listings & Link Management

Google Business Profile

Yelp Business Profile

Reputation Management

Overview

Organic traffic from search engines is easily what yields the highest long-term return on investment for local business owners.  It is how local businesses maximize their exposure within a search result without having to pay for ads. In other words, free traffic is the most profitable traffic. And the best way to achieve that is by ranking effectively on search engines by optimizing to send the best signals.

Google Maps and the Local Pack

Google Maps and the Local Pack. The way to grow organic traffic for your business is by showing up on Google Maps searches and in the Local Pack. That's prime real estate when it comes in local search. Having your business information show up there more often for searchers to discover you is key to driving more business. Data from research here are the major local search ranking factors that matter the most when optimizing for local searches. Below are focal points and corresponding actions you can take to improve upon all of these ranking factors and increase your visibility.

top of google search results

Listings & Link Management

Visibility on local search starts with a foundation of accurate and up-to-date information about your business that shows up accurately, consistently and in more instances online. Each of these instances is also known as a citation. More citations means more ways for more people to find your business. Yes its true that most people search on Google.That doesn’t mean you should ignore everyone else. After all, you are in business to make money.  As of January 2022, Google had 88% of searches in the United States. Which means the remaining 12% of people are searching elsewhere.Citations give search engines confidence in your business information by seeing it consistently across many places on the web. This is why it is a major ranking factor.

Create and Claim Your Listings at these Data Aggregators

Data-Axle
Foursquare
Neustar-Localeze

Create or Claim Major listing Profiles

Build Organic Back Links

Similar to a referral in real life,  back-links act like referrals that build authority and credibility for your web page online.  Furthermore, the more back-links you have from high quality sites, the more relevant and prominent your business will be viewed and the more traffic you will receive. 

Some of the most valuable links you can earn are from nearby businesses who have authoritative site.  Reach out to these businesses and find opportunities to collaborate. Cross promote around discounts, events and giveaways on your webpages and include links back and forth.

Arrange interviews, features or write ups on authoritative publications and websites in your field. Some of your customers could have prominent businesses that you can collaborate with. There are so many opportunities because everyone has a website nowadays.

And since outreach is often neglected by businesses, it’s the best way for your business to get ahead of the competition. Keep in mind that more is not always better with back-links.  Rather it is more valuable to have quality links over quantity.  Earning a citation from the local news station website is more valuable than 10 citations from sites with poor reputation.

Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile is the number #1 ranking factor that determines who shows up in the local pack part of the Google search results page. Set up, claim, optimize and manage your Google Business Profile. Optimizing your Business Profile can help your business to rank higher on Google and be on top of local search results. Getting your business in front of all that web traffic is how you find customers. This site details the biggest factors for ranking on local searches. Here’s what you can do.

Choose The Right Categories

Sounds simple, but this one can make or break you. Google needs to know what category your business belongs to so it can find relevant search matches.

Keyword In Your Business Title

This one is tricky because it’s the easiest fix and brings almost instant results. But not so fast. Google wants you to use your real offline business name. So don’t go stuffing keywords in your business profile name. You can get tagged for spam and be penalized by Google.

Add Products & Services

Listing menu items on your Google Business Profile helps customers learn about your food and also helps Google understand more about your business so it can match you with relevant searches.

Manage Reviews

The content here carries more weight because it’s generated by customers. Teach your community. When customers leave more detailed reviews you, it increases visibility for your business. Additionally, business listings that display engagement and communication between the business owner/manager and its’ customers clearly convert better.

Utilize Posts

Another opportunity to let your visitors AND Google know about all the products and services that you offer so that you can improve on your relevancy score. Having posts that display recent posting dates help with conversions.

Create Google Site

This is an under utilized feature of Google. As a general rule, we know that Google wants searchers to stay on their pages. So they will show preference some way towards profiles with the business website built.

Reputation Management

Because no one is going to click on a one-star business.

Manage Negative Reviews

Even the best intended business can suffer from the occasional negative experience. You need a system that gets in front of these negative experiences before they end up online somewhere. You can do this by asking every customer about their experience and give them an opportunity to share with you directly first. This can sound like a lot of work but there is software available out there that can automate most of this for you. ManyChat, Ovation and Ekomi all have their own version of this service available to businesses. By getting to these negative experiences first, you have the opportunity to “make it up” to your customers and deter them from posting them online.

Enroll Positive Reviews

The same software mentioned above also comes with tools that make it easier for customers to share their positive experiences at your desired sites. You can use this technology to build some rapport with your customers which gives you a better chance at them leaving positive reviews for your business.

Learn

One of the most underrated values of customer feedback is the content itself. Customers are sharing what they love and what they hate about your business so use this as an opportunity to learn and improve your product/service to better serve them.