Local SEO Done Right: How to Optimize Your Business Online in 2016

​It's not the most glamorous of things to focus on for your local business, but SEO is critical to your online presence and can be key to new customers finding you.

​While SEO is a complex web of ever-changing technicalities and strategy, here's a quick breakdown of a few essentials so you have a broader understanding of what's important to focus on for your business: 







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​1) Your Website
It needs to be good. It needs to be optimized for mobile, easy to navigate, fast to load, and have all the SEO data that Google's heart desires. Test it out on your phone, or have one of those dang millenials pull it up for you: how does it look? Are you frustrated with the experience? If so, imagine how your customers feel.

Your website is the ultimate storefront for your business: it sets the tone on how you want to be perceived and acts as a tool for customers to access your services. Make sure you are clearly directing them to the most critical information about your business and get to the point - fast. Let's not forget all those critical SEO nuggets like header tags, page URLs, inbound links, and other website details that you'll need to make sure is targeted towards your intended customer - there are plenty of online tools available to you to help sort through the madness, if you so desire. 

1) Your Profiles: Think Social, and Google Listings
While social media has slowed down in the world of marketing "new shiny things", it's still important to have a complete presence on key social channels for your audience. That means knowing if your audience is primarily on LinkedIn or Facebook, and making sure all of the essential data on your company page is accurate and filled out. 

Google listings are also one of the absolute first things to pop up when users search a local business or service. Make sure to claim your Google Listing page, add important information like your website, store hours, your phone number / email, and accurate business description. 

Then if you are really on your marketing game and are blogging on a regular basis (which you are totally doing because of all the SEO goodness, right?) than you should link your social accounts to your blog so your latest content gets pushed out to social channels once published automatically. P.S., Let me know if you need help with this.

1) Your Reviews
We all have the customer trolls, but soliciting the good ones to write a review on your behalf will significantly increase your likelihood of showing up on local Google search results. This can be as simple as asking a happy customer, or offering a discount in exchange for a review. It's important to be proactive here, and some automation may help. The more (hopefully positive) reviews your prospects see, the more likely they will be to engage with you. And remember, if you ignore building this aspect of your online presence, an online presence will be created for you. Which end of that spectrum would you like to be on? 

Does all of the above make you sad to think about? Contact me for some budget-friendly local SEO options (so you can actually focus on, you know, your business).

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