Dominate SERPs with Local SEO: 5 Actionable Tips for Small Businesses

The internet allows you to reach a massive audience globally, but if you are a small business providing services or a product within selected geographical areas within your city, then targeting a specific local audience is beneficial for scaling your business. Planning on world domination isn’t possible until you can successfully capture the eyes of locals first 🙂 With location specific searches, you can potentially capture viewer’s attention and get more exposure easily with the help of local seo services.

When it comes to local seo, it is important you master the on page and off page seo tactics that can help you immensely in ranking on top for relative searches made by your potential client or customer. 

SEO optimisation + GMB/GB profile optimisation is the key to dominate local search rankings. 
With the help of a right local seo agency sydney, you can curate a sureshot strategy to boost your online presence and get more leads. In this article, we have curated our top expert tips to optimise your local seo strategy and dominate SERPs.

Why do you need to optimise for local search?

To get an idea on the extent why local seo matters, we need to look at some numbers as they speak for themselves – 

1. 70% of consumers will visit the store offline because of the information available online.

1. ‘Near me’- search term has seen a surge of over 136% more usage compared to last year.

1. 62% of consumers will disregard a business if they can’t find them online.

It is inevitable to ignore that businesses in the present time have to coexist with offline and online marketing as the internet is seemingly becoming a more powerful marketing platform.

Enhance Titles and Meta Descriptions

HTML elements such as meta titles and descriptions are a short content feature where you can hint a relative idea about your featured product, content and information on what the page is about. 

Think of it like a small advertisement, where you must attempt to capture the interest of the audience and indulge them by clicking the link.

It is important that both should talk in context of the content and should induce keywords to stand out in the search page. The recommended length of the title is 50-60 characters and description is upto 160 characters and hence, the space should be used wisely.

Writing meta titles and descriptions is a great copywriting skill. If your text isn’t unique and compelling, does not align with google’s stature then it is most likely to suffer in the ranking process which can hurt its progress.

Here are some tips to make the content stand out – 

• Character limit is important to consider when crafting a perfect title. Don’t waste spaces on words or symbols that don’t relate to the sentence and aren\’t helpful in providing more context to the page.

• Inducing keywords is important but don\’t get overboard with it and stuff it all over the copy. Target one specific keyword and carefully place it in the beginning or the middle of the sentence for both.

• The best way to get your page ranking in local search results is to induce your city name in the title. For instance if my brand, Brothers plumbing is serving in Sydney, then the title should include –  Serving Sydney or Bella Vista NSW

If your page starts ranking, then know that your meta content will be responsible mostly for the conversions and hence, optimise it completely.

Capitalise on Google Business Profile by Optimising it

Local SEO services when paired with Google business profile and Google advertising is a powerful marketing tactic. We cannot stress more in recommending brands to start their GMB profile and optimise it to its fullest as not only it is going to attract more visitors but it also serves as a blueprint of credibility of your brand.

It is one of the easiest places a visitor can know more about your brand and can create an image of what they can expect from your service by seeing the reviews.

Note that Google Business profile is free and if you are optimised enough to show up in Google’s top three recommendations pack, you can get incredible exposure.

Here’s all the information you need to optimise your business profile – 

• Start out by filling your basic information and selecting categories
• Add Business hours, including your weekend timings if applicable
• Writing a solid description about your brand and service
• Photos and Videos touring your shop, products, location,etc
• Including products/service you sell 
• Answering any potential questions customers can ask 
• Replying to reviews 
• Consistent updates on latest news, sales and offers 

With this, adding GMB/GB as a part of your marketing strategy can be a powerful tool to drive in more clients and customers. A professional google ad agency Sydney can guide you in setting up your profile and scaling it easily.

Website Optimisation 

Website pages are an important part of your online journey as your potential online viewers visit your site first before they engage in in-store experience.

If you are a service led business, the best way you can improve your site’s credibility is to build out separate service pages and dedicated pages to specific locations.  

This helps immensely in keyword targeting and helps people know more about the services available in their area.

For SEO purposes, instead of a short paragraph you now have a whole dedicated page to talk more about your service with quality content and can induce relative keywords to optimise.

So invest in enhancing your SEO through improving your site’s response, creating service pages and targeting quality local specific keywords. You can hire a professional seo agency Sydney to take care of your online campaigns while you can focus on your business.

Make it Mobile Friendly

Mobile searches are undoubtedly taking over the nominal desktop queries and it is important to know that your site should be mobile friendly and smooth responsive.

Optimise your site to be more responsive to commonly asked questions. Assign a digital assistant bot and programme it to answer the most casually asked questions, for more queries you can redirect it to contact directly to you. 

To know what these common types of questions are, you can look at your internal search metrics and analytics to know more about these common questions asked in the market and your business in general.

You can also look upto your social media to analyse your messages or comments, questions asked in the Google business profile, LinkedIn, Etc. for more data.

Ensure your site is page responsive, engaged with high quality images and videos and quality content.

Invest in Content

Blogs in 2023 are still as important as they were before. Whenever a new article gets published, it becomes an extension of your original website and you can optimise the content with induction of quality keywords to rank on geographical specific search engine ranking pages (SERPs)

Content optimisation is one of the most important aspects of local seo. You can drive a large audience by writing content, solving their general queries about the product/service, giving them tips, advising on do’s and don\’ts – creating a whole ecosystem of content revolving around your respective market or the industry. 

This not only will benefit your audience by curing what we like to call – their thirst for knowledge but also spark an interest in your services provided and increase your brand’s credibility. 

To start creating content or blog section, here are some tips – 

• Start out by finding what are the common questions the consumers in your specific industry generally ask about.

• Research more about the topic and curate a set of bullet points your dedicated article will talk about.

• Now map out your article in sequences. A common sequence of such articles follows in order – Introduction, Context, Content Specifics, Conclusion. You can customise the order however you like.

• Pen your article down in simple words that can be easily understandable. Quality content will outperform others and you can genuinely curate a pool of readers that can be your potential customers in future.

• Induce location specific keywords all over your content and optimise it frequently by updating it from time to time.

Final Takeaway

In Conclusion,

If your brand serves products/services, it is important you capitalise on the online market and attract eyeballs to your business by solving their queries and providing enough information online.

By getting on the top of the local search results and optimising your GMB/GB listings and content, you can help your brand dominate in your area/city and drive an excellent number of leads over year.
Looking for the top notch SEO experts? Whether you are looking for an ecommerce agency Sydney or google ad experts, Digitalzoop is ready to skyrocket your online exposure! Contact us today and book your free SEO consultation.