With 78% of people in agreement, Google has become the new homepage for local businesses
COVID’s here, and supposedly here to stay. If you’re reading this now, it’s still relevant as we can only assume local SEO has changed “buyer” behavior forever.
Pulling data from reputable sources, this post is geared to help you gain more customers. What would be even more helpful is if you knew your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). If you know that figure, you can determine how many you need in order to stay in business, and potentially thrive.
1. With regards to most businesses looking at reducing marketing costs, the impact of your SEO and local strategy has never been more important.
Alright, so what should you do? According to SEO experts:
- If you don’t already have a Google My Business (GMB) listing, create one, or claim ownership of the one that already exists.
- Make sure you’ve created a detailed page for each service you offer, which helps with page rank and authority.
- Implement and maintain a review building strategy (custom links, reputation management, and SMS review requests).
- Localizing your website’s content, including words about the region(s) or neighborhood(s) you want to focus on.
- Build high quality white-hat links with other related local businesses and directories.
- Optimize internal linking structure, so that spiders can crawl your page faster and easily understand it.
- Improve your websites load time, as it’s become one of our favorite SEO tactics for increasing traffic.
These are extremely basic, but the more of them you accomplish, the better your spider “web”.
2. For GMB, and less-specifically all other listing management tools, here are some things you should do to optimize for local search results:
- Go get more reviews. It may seam scary to give anyone and everyone access to review your business, but in the long-run and assuming you run a business well, you’ll give Google a reason to get you populate in search engine results pages.
- Make sure you’ve chosen a category for which your business focusses on. There are sub-categories, but there should be at least one primary.
- Find your niche within your industry and stick with it. You can target other services, but you really want to focus on your bread-and-butter customers.
- Already mentioned but well-worth the second piece of advice, go get connected with local directories, and websites operating in the same area as you. Some of them may require a fee, but there a plenty that don’t. Go find them.
3. How do you maximize the value of your reviews? Do you take that extra initiative to respond back to people that review your business? Here’s why you should:
- 42% of companies have invested in automated listing management. The advanced service that we offer comes with detailed reporting of these values, as well as reputation management.
- Asking each customer for a review can significantly boost your local search rankings, assuming they’re good reviews.
- The most value asset you have to influence customers is your brand and it’s reputation.
Local SEO Conclusion:
As the future continues to unveil, GMB and other listing management platforms get traffic for people that are looking for businesses like yours. Every business is different and no tactic is one-size-fits-all, but you can be strategic about who you’re trying to win-over. We provide local optimization services for the Texas market, as that’s where we like to focus. We’re a small business, just like you, and do what we need to do to help you gain customers.
So, if you have a goal in mind, or even if you don’t, we would recommend calculating your customer lifetime value. Once you have that number, you can do some optimizations, run tests, and see what works for you. Once you find your average new customer on-boarding number, you can start projecting how much more money you’re going to make. Customer retention is just as important, but if they’re not coming in, how can you keep them? You can also hire someone else to do it, as it can be daunting and requires a lot of work.
“Time is money.”
