Following on from our recent blog, Top tips for local SEO rankings, we look into the principles and benefits of local SEO for SMEs.
What is SEO for SMEs? It is the process of enhancing your website’s functionality and user experience in order to increase its search engine visibility.
Specifically, SEO for SMEs is all about ranking in organic search results.
Being a local business owner, you may feel overwhelmed with the prospect of ranking against some national companies that offer a similar service or product to you.
Or companies with apparent spending power within Google, either on paid Google ads search or having a premium website with a sound marketing SEO plan behind it.
This may be a concern regarding the main organic listings, but it’s not the case for local searches.
People looking for a service or product using Google to find local businesses has leapt from 63% in 2020/21 to 81% in 2021/22.
Local searches allow you to better connect with potential clients in your local towns, cities or just serving a specific geographical area, thus helping with local SEO for SMEs.
So here are our tips for giving your local SEO rankings a boost!
Tips for local SEO for SMEs
-
- To improve your business’s local ranking, use Google Business Profile to claim and update your business information. Learn more about how Google sources business information for search results. Higher rankings in Google local search mean more face-to-face clients, which is great news for any business that offers a walk-in service, such as retail sales and local sales and service companies.
- . You can look at targeted local sales strategies, to assist with local SEO for SMEs such as social media advertising with a call to action that takes the user directly to your website. Post-COVID, the number of people now shopping locally has risen, bucking the trend of smaller, local businesses being overwhelmed by larger stores and internet sales. Since COVID-19, a global study has highlighted the depth of support and the strength of society’s reliance on small firms, revealing the degree to which the UK cherishes these enterprises. According to commissioned study, seven in ten customers worldwide want to support their own local companies by purchasing more goods or services from them post the pandemic. According to the study, three in four UK consumers (75%) express a personal sense of loss when a small business closes in their local area. This finding recognises the vital role that small businesses play in influencing purchases within their local area.
- Ensuring that you have visibility and findability within Google Maps, people can see you are literally on their doorstep, making finding you easy. For this to work efficiently, you must ensure that your address and contact information is always up to date.
- Optimising and creating relevant content that includes localised information and terms, this will enable you to attract better leads and enquiries. This can be in the form of case studies, blogs, social media posts and localised, targeted, paid-for advertising.
- Local reviews are crucial, and your good reputation will increase brand awareness and certainly attract more business opportunities. Potential customers like and trust reviews and will be more likely to visit your website or business in person if they can find good feedback about your company when doing an initial internet search. Having local feedback reinforces your good name and strengthens trust.
- Once you focus on local content for your SEO, you are also more likely to start getting valuable backlinks and alliance partnerships from local businesses, thus spreading the word organically.
- Engage with your audience on all social media platforms; many companies use automated ‘bots’ to reply to enquiries; instead of this, a personal reply makes your business approachable and ‘humanised’, making sure to include links to FAQs or relevant pages within your website, to provide valuable SEO rich links to your website.
- Mobile searches account for 61% of all Google searches. Therefore, local and mobile searches go hand in hand.
People will frequently use your website on mobile devices to check reviews, get driving directions to your business, and obtain contact information. The “near me” mobile search volume has grown by 250% since 2017.
Make your website mobile-friendly to make things simple for your visitors and clients.
Any SEO strategy for local businesses must include local SEO. Therefore, it is vital to identify all SEO opportunities for the local area. If done correctly, it will be a large part of a successful marketing strategy for your business.
Why Growth by Design for local SEO for SMEs?
Having an exceptional plan is crucial to getting local SEO right; at Growth by Design, we recognise this can be tricky for business owners. You want to focus on growing your business and delivering the product or service you are passionate about, not doing the nitty-gritty of the marketing for it.
So, how can we help?
Our team of local SEO specialists are on hand to guide you through the process. They will create a specific plan to give your company the best possible local SEO to elevate your business locally.
Our promise to you includes being:
Focused
Instead of vanity metrics, we aim for meaningful business results for you.
Structured
We’ll support you in creating specific plans, carrying them out, and monitoring the outcomes.
Clear
Without using waffle or technical jargon, we will converse in your sort of language!!
Strategic
We will provide you with targeted, well-researched recommendations.
Trustworthy
We will establish ourselves as a trustworthy, expert addition to your internal team.
Contact us today to see how we can elevate your local SEO from satisfactory to spectacular!!
