Being a small business owner can be a real challenge. You have all the stresses for business success that larger companies have, but you also potentially have less resources to help you accomplish your goals. For small local businesses, this is especially true. And while being a local business can help to give your marketing strategies more focus and direction, it can also be difficult to know just how to leverage all your resources to help you attain what your company needs.
One area that all local businesses should be focusing on is local SEO. However, this is much easier said than done, especially as this tactic changes and grows over time. So to help struggling small businesses get a better handle on their online efforts, here are three tips that will help your small business have more success with local SEO this year.
Keep An Eye Out For Changes
Internet marketing is almost in a state of constant change. In an effort to give consumers a better experience, search engines and other online directories have to be continuously altering how they function both with businesses and for consumers. For this reason, there are always many changes taking place with regards to best practices for SEO and local SEO. If you want your business to be competitive, you have to make understanding these changes a priority.
Greg Gifford, a contributor to Yext.com, shares that many of the changes taking place for local SEO within Google alone have the potential to create a lot of chaos for local businesses in 2016. But by listening to industry experts and doing your own research on how you can mold your local SEO strategy into what it needs to be, you can still find success in this marketing avenue.
Create a Plan and Execute It
Regardless of what the trends of local SEO are suggesting, there’s little chance of your business having any success without adequately creating a plan and then effectively executing that plan. To help with this, Marcus Miller, a contributor to Search Engine Land, recommends for businesses struggling with formulating a local SEO strategy and execution plan to use either the SOSTAC or the RACE plans. Both of these forms of digital marketing strategy will help you analyze where your business currently is and what your best plan of action will be to get you to your goals. If you already have plans such as these, consider re-evaluating them for the new year to ensure you have the most up-to-date strategy possible.
Focus on the Right Metrics
When your business relies heavily on one form of marketing, the amount of time and attention you give to that tactic can at times be overwhelming. Once you get so far into a marketing channel, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s really important and how everything fits into the big picture. Because of this, knowing the right metrics to focus on can be a huge help for local SEO efforts.
According to Mark Sullivan, a contributor to LSAInsider.com, the best metrics for small businesses for focus on with regards to their local SEO efforts are site traffic, calls, direction requests, and reviews. While you may think your rankings are the end-all, be-all, consider weighing the other four metrics as well to find the real health of your local SEO efforts.
Local SEO can truly give small businesses the online success they need to make an impact in their service area. By using the tips mentioned above for 2016, your small business should see growth in your local SEO efforts, leading to more overall business success this year.
Originally posted on January 8, 2016 @ 7:35 am