How to optimize your local business website for marketing success
Updated for 2019
- Have an organized, optimized website
Having a website that works well and is easy to navigate is one of the most important aspects of online marketing, whether you have a brick and mortar local business or a PO Box. Ensuring both navigation and content organization is easy with a WordPress website. The available themes are almost always clean and provide a good foundation for your website design and structure. Following SEO best practices is made easier with the Yoast SEO plug-in for WordPress. Need WordPress hosting? It helps to know a few rules that have long been established by the leading authority on search engine optimization best practices: Google. We talk a little bit more about several steps you can take to follow best practices in our in-depth small business marketing success article. The chapter, ‘Optimize your content‘ outlines SEO basics that will help you optimize your local business website content.
Designed by Freepik - Have optimized, useful content
It goes without saying, a website is a collection of content. Without content to inform, educate or entertain, you have nothing. The content draws the user to your business, and the website design allows people to access the content. A content strategy aims to create sustainable, cohesive, engaging and meaningful content. It defines what content will be published and why you’re publishing it. There are also best practices for content creation. Learn more about Making content that matters on our external blog, seowebdesignwi.com.Inbound/Content Marketing Tip: Build a buyer persona by asking your customers about their habits and hobbies to identify their likes, dislikes, needs and wants. Build content to answer their questions, and market content that solves their problems.
- Distribute content via social media marketing, email marketing and paid advertising
Social media is a great platform for generating leads while providing a modern avenue of customer service. Social media marketing enables you to build your small business brand voice and relationships with customers, while sending users to your products and services. We have a succinct and easy to follow list of tactics on how to run a social media marketing campaign for a small or local business in the chapter ‘Social Media Marketing‘ in our Small business marketing success article.- Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, SlideShare, Instagram
Managing multiple accounts can be simplified using a social media marketing tool like Hootsuite to connect up to 3 accounts. You can schedule up to 30 posts in advance, so you can move on to managing your business while your content is shared at peak times on each platform. You don’t have to have a presence on every social media platform, just choose the most popular and engaging among your target audience. You should already have a good idea which platforms your customers use from your business plan and your buyer personas. - Share content that follows platform rules, format requirements, and engages your audience. Have fun and connect with people. (Create images optimized for size and whitespace and entertainment/information, share videos and news, and pay for targeted local advertising campaigns to bring attention to your presence and content.)
- Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, SlideShare, Instagram
Secret of Psychology: Be Local Proud! Use local hashtags in social, attend, sponsor or host local events, spread the word, use offline marketing tactics, connect with other local businesses and influencers
- Have optimized, useful content
- Optimize for local search
- NAP: Your Name, Address, and Phone should be consistent across the web, and where available, link back to your website. Use our local seo listing checker to verify your business NAP integrity on local directories.
- Microdata, website title
Implementing a WordPress plugin that utilizes schema.org standards for your address, such as the Organization Schema Widget or WP SEO Structured Data Schema, you add rich snippets for enhanced visual results in search engine results pages, such as Google’s knowledge graph card for local business, events or music.
It is also important to follow SEO best practices by including your city and state in your website title, enhancing your contact page and providing relevant, local content. - Local listings: GMB (Google My Business/ Places page), Bing, Yelp, Infogroup
Ensuring your business is listed in local business directories and maps helps you maintain control over your data and improves your visibility in those directories as well as search results. The more accurate citations you have, the better your integrity will be. You will rank higher than other similar business with fewer accurate citations. Using a tool to keep all of your listings updated, including business and holiday hours, makes it easier to maintain consistency. Learn more about local search engine optimization factors by following our checklist or contacting us to sign up for our automated local listing management tool. - More local citations & reviews
It is important also that your customers leave you reviews and allow you the opportunity to respond to them. This shows potential and existing customers your level of customer support and customer satisfaction – more people are likely to follow recommendations of friends and past customers before choosing to become a customer.
- Implement website tools
- Submit sitemap to Google Search Console
- Submit sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools
- Track website users through Google Analytics
Website analytic software tells you how your site is performing through important user metrics. These are quantifiable data that measure website marketing success. Setting up goals that track visitor activity provides better measurements for potential customer conversions. Now that the user is aware of your business, you’ve got to persuade them that your product or service is what they need and make them feel good about trusting you with their valuable time, attention and patronage. Setting and measuring goals helps you monitor the steps through your sales funnel so you can better adjust your tactics for improved leads, conversions and satisfaction throughout the customer relationship.- Establish and monitor website goals
Follow our short guide to creating goals in Google Analytics on our blog. - Connect Analytics to Search Console
- Establish and monitor website goals
- Optimize for mobile, voice and speed
Mobile device usage is integrated into our daily lives. You simply must have a mobile responsive or mobile version of your website. To gain mobile rankings, you should optimize for screen real estate, as well as follow all SEO best practices. The best way to optimize your local business website for mobile is to revisit your design and choose a responsive template and add mobile site plug-ins, such as AMP, or other necessary tools for enhanced user experience on smaller screens. A good designer will also design from the ground up – designed for mobile, and adapted to larger screens.
Other device usages are also a part of our daily lives, from “Okay Google” to Alexa and Siri and other smart home devices. To optimize for voice search, update your subject from long-tail keywords to conversational subject matter: what question are you answering? Use structured data markup where possible and ensure your local business listings are as complete and accurate as possible, including your category.
Google uses site speed and page speed as a ranking factor. It has been an increasingly important element of a great website since before it became a ranking factor in 2010. Google and other search engines will index pages with short load times, and may choose not to index a page that takes seconds to access. Learn how to optimize your website for speed in our Small business marketing success article. - Balance paid marketing with content marketing
Paying for advertising will directly target your primary customers by demographic, location and interest, and offers immediate results, but you don’t have to break the bank to boost your business. You can spend as little as $75 a month and stop your advertising at any time. Pay per click is highly customizable and flexible and makes a great part of a well-rounded marketing plan. Content marketing can be free, but it takes time to build a following, and get ranked in organic search engine results because of the vast and varying ranking factors from site engagement to domain age to quantity and quality of earned incoming links.- Use social and offline marketing tactics to complement existing marketing strategies.
Guerrilla marketing and print media are still relevant and creative marketing tactics today. Some offline marketing tactics are more expensive than others, but there are still many free marketing tactics for local businesses that drum up excitement and gain the attention of new customers. Get some ideas from our ‘Offline marketing‘ chapter in our Small business marketing success article.
- Use social and offline marketing tactics to complement existing marketing strategies.
For more information on our website optimization or small business content development, contact us. Learn more about Local SEO or social media marketing on our blog.
Thanks for sharing such an informative blog post regarding the optimization of local business website. Definitely going to consider it while promoting my local business.