Local SEO is a great ally for all physical stores.
As we talk about local SEO, then we must know Google Maps is essential to develop a local business. It allows you to highlight your business in the Google search results.
What are the best practices to know to reach the top and improve your local SEO? Here are some ideas to help with that.
1. Create a Google Business Profile Page
The first step to appear in Google Maps results is to create a Google Business Profile.
This procedure is extremely secure, and is not likely to be hacked. Before you can enter the bulk of your information related to your business, you will first have to go through the verification process. There is only one main option to get your business verified now, which is receipt of a postcard sent to your address with a code.
Once this code is entered onto your listing you are verified and you can the include:
- The full contact details of your business
- Your website
- The services offered
- The price range
- Opening Hours etc.
2. Get listed in the right categories
The categories here represent equivalents of the keywords. You must therefore be as precise as possible and choose a main category as well as secondary categories that reflect the range of your business activity.
Don't hesitate to move away from categories that are too general. For example, you can use anything that is relevant to your business, like clothing store to boutique or fashion. In the same way, if you are a restaurant owner, indicate your niche directly: Lebanese cuisine restaurant rather than Restaurant.
To be sure you're choosing the right categories, put yourself in your customers' shoes. When looking for more categories, you can be much more specific.
For example, if we are looking how to increase traffic, we will type increase traffic to my website, but if we are looking for a toy business, we could seqrch for wooden toys near me.
3. Build Citations
Citations are directory listings including the name of your company, the address, the phone number and maybe the opening hours. They are taken into account by the different search engines and are considered as references mentioning your establishment.
Specifically, to create these citations, you will need to register with directories, websites and social networks.
As always in SEO, the authority and reliability of the referrer sites are essential. This means that you must carefully select the sites where you will build your citations. Better to do less, but more quallity.
Warning: Don't forget to enter the same information every time. The slightest mistake can discredit you and impact your local SEO.
You can even go to places like Fiverr and get Google Map Citations, which also helps to provide Google with relevance and more information on areas you cover. The best part about this is you are using a Google entity to do that!
4. Get more reviews
We've already explained several times why getting (positive) reviews is crucial for your brand image and improving your SEO. But as a reminder never hurts...
Reviews are a guarantee for Google. They allow it to continue to be the leader in search, ensuring it offers the most relevant results to its users.
It goes without saying that this is also good for your business. Internet users rely heavily on reviews left on the net and these greatly influence their decision.
If you have no or few reviews, you risk not being considered. And thus get less clicks to your website. As you can imagine, the less clicks you get, the lower your ranking will be in the natural results. That's why it's important to encourage your customers to leave a review. To improve engagement, you should always respond, even to a bad review. In your response to bad reviews, be sure you reply in a polite way and try to reassure people you are on the case of dealing with unhappy customers andsolving their problem.
5. Be active on social networks
Social proof is paramount on the web and the web giant is attentive to the interactions conducted on other social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.
Don't neglect your company page and try to grow your networks and enage so that Google notices them.
Working on local SEO on the one hand, and on managing your community on the other will allow you to improve your ranking and appear in the top results of Google Maps.
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