Small Business SEO – The Definitive Guide For Local Business

Do you find SEO difficult? Do you expect it requires big budget to do SEO and rank locally? Do you feel that SEO doesn’t work for local businesses? 

We are here to help you. 

People think SEO is just for big businesses. But as a small company or a local business, you can do a lot to get good results from the search.

This definitive guide for local and small business SEO will help you get the most out of search engines. But first you should know about Local SEO.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is basically about optimizing for local search engine results. It’s fair to say that local SEO and small business SEO are closely related.

As long as Google’s local search result pages continue to grow and improve, we’ll never be done with this subject. 

Now lets start doing seo stuff.

1) Create a clear site architecture 

Your site should make sense to navigate. Your homepage should link to your other important pages (about, content, services). Your services page should list and link to pages describing different services. 

This may sound obvious, but we’ve found that with small business websites especially, this often isn’t the case.

Things usually start pretty logically, but as they add pages over time, things fall apart.

How do you fix this? The trick is to try to look at your website with fresh eyes and make sure it has a logical structure. Start at your homepage and see if you can logically find and navigate to all your important pages quickly and easily.

Your website might not have this same issue but there are probably other similar ones. So the best thing to do is grab a pen and paper and start making an ideal structure for your site. 

2) Keep your site free from broken pages & links

Broken stuff on a website is never good. Not for visitors, and not for SEO.

Think about it: what does a website with broken pages and links say to you? Most likely that it’s rarely updated, neglected, and that the site owner doesn’t care about keeping their website functioning properly.

For finding 404 pages you can use any seo tools but i prefer ahrefs. It has the latest website insights in their database.

If you find any backlinks pointing to the broken pages, they waste “link equity.“ That means that links to your site aren’t counted because they lead to a dead end.

You can fix these in two ways:

  • Recreate the dead page (if you deleted it by accident)
  • Redirect the dead page to an appropriate alternative (i.e., either the new location of that page or a similar page or post)

If the page has no referring domains, it’s generally okay to leave as is.

You should also fix broken outbound links on your website. These are problematic for the same reason. You’re linking to dead pages which effectively wastes link equity and contributes to poor user experience.

Fix them by removing or updating the links.

3) Make sure every page has meta title and description

Every page on your website needs a unique meta description and title.

These are what you typically see in the Google search results:

Not only should every page on your website have a unique meta title and description, but they also need to:

  • Not exceed the length at which Google begins to truncate them in the search results.
  • Entice search engines users to click-through to your site.
  • Contain your target keyword

Use site audit of any SEO tools. It will show the all errors of your website. You’ll see any problems related to your HTML tags including titles and meta descriptions. Click on each issue to see affected pages. 

Then go to each page and start adding or editing the effected page or you can hire a freelancer to do this in case if you’re busy.

4) Update your written copy

Most pages on your website will have some written copy and this needs to be on point.

Google looks at the content on a website to help understand what is your website or web page about. If there is little or no content on your web pages or if that content isn’t well-optimized, then they’re going to have a difficult time doing that.

That’s not to say that you have to write 2,000-word essays on every page.

Some pages might warrant that, but others might be okay with a couple of hundred words.

Generally speaking, here are some SEO “rules” for website copy:

  • Include some copy on every page. How much? That’s up to you. We would personally recommend at least 100–200 words as a general rule of thumb.
  • Use one H1 tag on each page. This serves as the heading of the page. Quite often, this is the same as the meta title but it doesn’t have to be.
  • Use H2-H6 tags as appropriate. These are subheadings. 
  • Don’t include keywords that don’t fit in your copy. 
  • Make sure spelling and grammar are on point. 

5) Get citations by listing your business in relevant places on the web

Google doesn’t only look at the copy and structure of your website when analyzing where you should rank. They look at many off-page SEO factors too, one of which is citations.

Here’s why you should care about citations from an SEO point of view:

  • Citation signals are one of the top local ranking factors. 
  • Google isn’t the only search engine people use. 

So where do you start?

Perhaps the most important citation from the perspective of ranking and appearing in Google for relevant terms is Google My Business.

Why so important?

Have you ever Googled a business and seen something like this in the search results?

That’s known as the “map pack,” and there are two things you should know about it:

  • It often appears at the top of the search results for local terms. This means that it pushes down the “regular” organic listings. 
  • It pulls data from Google My Business listings. These are free business profiles from Google.

I am assuming you have Google My Business profile setup. If not check out this video to create Google My Business profile.

You need to make sure that your profile is optimized. That means doing things like:

  • Choosing the right category (very important!)
  • Adding more categories
  • Uploading relevant photos
  • Adding your opening hours
  • Adding details about individual services
  • Adding additional phone numbers
  • Adding relevant amenities
  • Etc.

Still, Google My Business isn’t the only place you should be listed.

It also pays to list your business in the other “big” directories (Hotfrog, Acxiom, Thomson Local, etc.), and also relevant industry-specific directories that are likely to send business your way.

For the big directories, you can use a service like Moz Local.

Just enter your business name and Moz will check which of the “big” recommended directories you’re already listed on, and which you should create profiles on.

6) Ask for links from the businesses with whom you’re affiliated

Links are the foundation of the original PageRank formula, which is the formula on which Google is based. Google has also admitted that links are one of the top three ranking factors (as of 2016).

The problem? Link building can be daunting, especially for small business owners.

So, I’m not going to cover any elaborate strategies. I’m simply going to recommend one thing as a starting point: ask for links from businesses with whom you have existing relationships e.g: suppliers, stockists, etc.

7) Improve site speed

Google says that 53% of mobile website visitors will abandon the page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. 

Many things can make your site slow i.e: plugins, bloated HTML, etc. 

Check how fast your web pages load using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool or GTMetrix

If those tools report a slow website, it may be worth hiring someone to improve your site speed. Here are some of the things you may want to work on.

8) Add schema markup in your site

Schema markup can help Google to understand your website better. It can also change how your web pages appear in the search results. 

If you’ve ever Googled a recipe and seen review stars, cooking time, and other data in the search results, that is thanks to schema markup. 

For small businesses with a physical location, I would recommend looking into the LocalBusiness markup. If you have product or service pages on your site, look into Product and Service markup.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, there are many things you can do as a small business to improve your site and rank better. 

For small businesses, taking care of these SEO basics is often enough to put you ahead of the competition.

There are several factors related to local SEO that help small businesses. 

Make sure Google My Business has the right details, keep track of your ratings and reviews, increase your website load speed, add scheme markup in your site, try to get links from related small businesses, and many more. 

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