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The Secret to Mastering the Art of Local SEO

Shane Barker 2 Stories

Tuesday July 16, 2019 , 5 min Read

It’s challenging for local businesses to compete with big brands. Challenging, but not impossible. You need to create a strong,fail-proof local SEO strategy for your local business. It will help you stay relevant in your niche and successfully compete with big brands.

Other than this, it will also help you to improve your targeting, generate more sales, and improve your search engine rankings. The question is how can you master the art of local SEO and create an effective local SEO strategy?

Well, there are two effective and actionable ways to strengthen your local SEO and secure top ranking on search engines. The first is to create a mobile responsive website and the second is to motivate your customers to submit positive reviews.

1. Design a Mobile-Responsive Website

Mobile devices have become an integral part of our lives. With the availability and accessibility to high-speed internet, the use of mobiles is increasing. This is leading to an increase in the number of mobile searches.

It’s projected that the number of mobile users will reach 4.68 billion in 2019. Also, in 2018, mobile devices generated 52.2% of all website traffic, and that percentage is expected to increase even more.

This is the reason you need to design a mobile responsive website for your local business. It will help you improve the user experience. In addition, it can also strengthen your local SEO and will give you an edge over your competitors.

How can you create a mobile responsive website? Don’t worry, you can follow the tips mentioned below to create a mobile responsive website:

Make sure that you optimize your visuals including videos and images. This will help you reduce the page load time.

Don’t create a complex navigation plan and website layout for your website. Always make sure to keep it simple and easy so that your website visitors can easily navigate it and find what they are looking for.

Analyze the page load speed of your website and pages. And improve the speed, if it’s slow. This will help you hold the attention of your website visitors.

If a visitor wants to share your blog post or product page, you need to make it as easy and simple as possible for them to do so. So, ensure that you add social media sharing buttons to your product pages and blog posts.

There are tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, which can help you check if your website is mobile-friendly or not. You can use this tool and (based on the results) improve the mobile responsiveness of your website.

Image Source - Google

2. Motivate Your Customers to Submit Positive Reviews

Positive feedback from your consumers can motivate 68% of your target consumers to visit and use your local business. Which indicates that positive feedback can help you get the attention of new potential customers.

Hence, don’t hesitate to ask for reviews and feedback from your loyal customers. Additionally, you can motivate them to share high ratings for your business online.

When it comes to millennials, 91% of them trust online reviews and personal recommendations equally. So, positive reviews and feedback can help you present your brand as more trustworthy.

However, before you expect your customers to leave positive reviews, you need to provide high-quality services to them. Let the quality of your services speak for your brand.

It will automatically encourage many customers to give positive reviews for your brand. They will also happily act as brand advocates and may even suggest your brand to their near and dear ones.

As a result, you can drive high-quality traffic to your website and generate more qualified leads. You can use the following strategies to encourage your customers to give positive reviews and feedback for your brand:

Don’t take your customers for granted. Make sure to ask your customers to give positive feedback for the brand in person once they buy your products or avail your services.

You can also take advantage of text messages or email marketing. Ensure that you send them an email or a text message asking for a review immediately after they purchase your services or products.

Always make sure to engage with the reviews and feedback you get. It doesn’t matter if it’s a positive or negative review. If it’s a positive review, then reply “thank you” to your customers and ask them to visit again. In the case of a negative review, apologize, and try to resolve their issues as soon as you can. Remember to behave professionally and politely.

Let’s say you are searching for “electricians in Seattle.” In the screenshot below, you can see the list of local businesses and their ratings.