Opening up a business online can be an intimidating process for any local business, however, you can benefit greatly from using SEO techniques to make your investment and time worth the while. Search engine optimization will not only make your business more likely to be found by local customers, it will open it to a broad range of customers throughout the world. By offering a nice SEO optimized website to the public, people will remember you when they are visiting the area and your business will thrive. Online advertising through a website for your local business has become one of the most proven ways to successfully promote a business and increase customer attraction. There are some great techniques you can use to help drive traffic to your website and up your rankings on the search engine during the process.
Before anything, you need to understand why exactly local SEO is important. Well, according to reports over 80% of people use a search engine when looking for local businesses. By creating a great looking website that is SEO optimized, you can put yourself ahead of the game by putting your business within those results. There are two search engines that are most commonly used, which are Google and Bing. Each of these engines requires a good search engine optimized site to make it to the top results. Did you know that it is rare for anyone to look beyond the first page of results? That fact in itself shows why good SEO optimization is vital for your local business success.
Adding your business to Google +local is one of the best ways to get your name out there and help increase your rankings. Google +local is basically a directly of local businesses and it allows users to find information about your company easily. By reaching a 100% score on +local you can also get ahead of others with similar businesses because it is seldom that a businesses has a 100% score.
Creating social networking sites for your local business is a great way to drive traffic to your site and help increase the rankings. You should try and sign up for as many social networking sites as possible and attempt to maintain these sites by offering information on what is going on at your business, while connecting with other local businesses as well.
Getting your business listed on local directories is another way to drive traffic to your local business. If you haven’t been getting the business you are looking for, you can list on sites such as; smilelocal.com and even implement a tool onto your website that will show what is helping to increase your traffic.
Creating a business blow and keeping it updated is a great way to drive traffic to your site, keep visitors coming back and increase your SEO ranking. If you are unable to keep up with the content on your blog, you can even hire a company to provide you with fresh, well-written material on a consistent basis.