High Search Rankings
If you have an online business, you know how important it can be to maintain a high search ranking. When people look online for information, the first place they often turn is a search engine, such as Google or Bing. If your website does not appear near the top of the search results, you are not going to get many visitors.
Because of this, you need to make sure that you are investing enough time and effort into search engine optimization, more commonly referred to as SEO. If you do not know what this term means, you need to learn right away. Neglecting SEO is one of the most common reasons that online businesses fail.
Focus Locally
However, it is not enough just to focus on general SEO principles, such as selecting the right keywords or building links. While these can help, you also need to make sure that you focus on local SEO. Since many small businesses get most of their customers from the surrounding community, you need to make sure that you have a good search ranking for local searches.
The Internet makes it easy to attract customers from all over the world, but for many small businesses, this is not an important goal. If you run an auto repair shop, for example, you are not going to be interested in whether someone on the other side of the world can easily find your website. Instead, you are going to focus on establishing a strong local presence.
Strategies & Tools
You want to make sure that your site is one of the top results when people who live near your location search for auto repair shops. Fortunately, Google and the other big search engines make it easy to focus on promoting your presence to local searchers. By making good use of these tools, you can boost your search ranking without too much difficulty.
Of course, to receive the benefits of these features, you have to make use of them. This means that you have to make sure that you have given the big search engines plenty of information about your location. If you do not submit this information to Google and other search companies, they will have a harder time connecting you to your locality.
Focus & Time Management
However, investing the right amount of time and effort into local SEO can take time away from other parts of your business. You do not want to neglect your customers or provide poor service because you were so focused on boosting your search ranking. In many cases, you will be better off hiring an expert SEO firm to help you out. They can make sure that your website maintains a high ranking so that you can focus on providing great service.
By investing in a strong local SEO campaign, you can make sure that you maintain a highly visible presence in your community. With the right approach, you can attract more customers and make sure that your business thrives for many years to come.
Jon Rognerud and Chaosmap work with Fortune 500 companies, small business and entrepreneurs to create digital traffic strategies that scale up customers, leads and sales with profitable returns. Mr. Rognerud wrote a best-selling book (Buy On Amazon), “The Ultimate Guide To Optimizing Your Website” (Entrepreneur). Connect directly here.
