Tuesday 24 January 2012

Why Small Businesses Need Local SEO

In todays modern world there are a great many opportunities for the small business to increase their visibility and in the long term their profitability online, but you need to be able to reach your customers and let them know that you are there. It's pointless for a small business to spend a large part of their start up budget building the greatest website available if nobody knows of its existence. Any small business can make good use of Local SEO techniques that can help to boost their online presence and ensure that all the time, effort and money spent on creating your website is not wasted and becomes and remains visible to your customers.

Why is Local Business SEO so Important?
In answering this question we really need to understand how people and your clients in particular navigate around the internet as this will be a major factor in attracting those customers and driving more traffic to your website.

It is a fact that almost 80% of those people looking to purchase products and services online will start this procedure by utilising the search engines as a source of gathering information and leads. So it seems to be fairly obvious that being visible within these search engines would be of the utmost importance when it comes to promoting your business online. Small Business SEO can help greatly by ensuring that you initially optimise your website in order to create search engine friendly pages which will assist the site with ranking for the keyterms that you have chosen to target.

A lot of small businesses already understand the need to have a website to promote their bricks and mortar business but invariably fail to invest in any kind of Local SEO strategy to ensure that their efforts are of any real benefit and ROI to the company. This can be a big mistake as if customers cannot find your website quickly and easily they will just go to one of your competitors. As we have already stated most consumers are already looking for services and products on the web and this is generally because it is quick and easy, in most cases they will select from choices and options provided within the first 20 results that are returned to them via the search engines. Using Local SEO or the services of a local SEO provider to get your business included within those top results for your target audience will be a key factor in driving traffic to your site.

Of course every small business is different so it is important to get the initial elements of your Local SEO campaign right. The most important aspect of this would be getting the Keyword research right, keywords are an important part of any Local SEO campaign, but do you know what keywords will work best for you? Don't fall into one of the easiest traps ever when it comes to your keywords, and that is the misconception that you already know what terms your customers are using to search for your products and service. Most people DON'T at least not without having done some research first. You may know what your site is about (I would hope so) and how you would go about finding it but predicting how a potential customer would find it is not always that straightforward.


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