Local SEO The Basics

If you want to connect, interact and establish a good working relationship with your potential customers for your local business, then your priority should first focus on local SEO. This will help people near your area know more about your business and translate every website visit to either actual store visit or sales. The idea of local SEO is not rocket science; the more people in your area visit your site, the bigger the chances you get to convert them into actual visits and real profits.

You know how good it is to get into Google’s SERPs, but you also know how hard it is for your site to get into the top page of the list. If you don’t win the search, you most likely will not get the chance to get people in your site. It’s a simple domino effect; no targeted traffic equals no prospects, no prospects results to no conversions and sales. In layman’s term, you’re simply missing out on business.

Here are the basic SEO tactics to help your site attract local and targeted audience more effectively.

Put all the important information about your store clearly

The most basic strategy is usually the most common to be overlooked and misused by many budding internet marketers. In your site’s ‘About Us” page, banner and footer, make sure you put your physical address as your shop, restaurant or store. Include all important details to help visitors find you easily such as zip code, state, street name, room number, etc. Google map information for this is best included in your ‘Contact Us’ page. These information will be all indexed and will be crawled by web spiders for your search engine reference.

Using Google Places

As I’ve said above, you can include Google map or Google places to help your customers find your shop in no time. This is very advantageous especially for customers on the go who are using their mobile phones to search for your shop. This service is usually for free, so sign up and takes advantage of this stuff. Remember that only those registered websites will get the service of being searched. Join forums, read and ask SEO professionals to learn more about optimization in Google places.