Top 6 Best Local SEO Solutions of 2024

The new year is upon us, and with it comes new ways to enhance your local SEO solutions. Local SEO for small business is a way to competitively interact with your customers to make sure they find you when they are searching for a product or service you provide. When you are planning your local SEO strategy for 2024, you need to focus on what will make your website the best customer experience that you can.

When you focus on the following six SEO strategies, you can be assured that Google will take notice! Remember when Google takes notice so will your customers! Every notice of your website is one step closer to making a sale with a potential customer.

1.Build a Solid Google Business Profile. While it may be the simplest local SEO solution, grabbing your own Google Business Profile is an essential way to get the pertinent information about your business online and in front of your potential customers. Best of all, a Google Business Profile is free! After an easy verification process, you can get your listing optimized. What to include in your Google Business Profile:

- Business name
- Address and other location-specific information
- Phone number
- Hours of operation
- Optional, but great to have, are images of the interior and exterior of your business

One very important note: Be sure your information is the same across all listings, your website, and your social media! Any inconsistency will be held against you when it comes to determining your Google page rank.

When your Google Business Profile listing is accurate and consistent, you have a chance of earning the coveted SEO 3-pack result. This is the area of the Google search results page where potential customers can see the search results paired with a map and all Google Business Profile listings.

2.Create Credible Local Citations. Citations are the basic information about your business. They include your business’ name, address, phone number, and website. When you work to build credible local citations, you are ensuring your information is accurate and consistent among a variety of websites, like Bing, Yelp, Apple Maps, TripAdvisor, Facebook, and more. These citations will help to drive traffic to your website and demonstrate to the search engines that your business has a high level of credibility.

3.Choose the Best Keywords. All content on your website should be keyword-rich. This means that you learn which keywords are integral to your customers finding you, and then you organically include them in your website content. Website content is obviously what you post on your homepage, blogs, ‘about us’ page, and other content that the customer will actually read. It also includes the aspects of your webpage that only Google will read:

Page titles
Meta descriptions
Image captions
Image tags

Let’s look at an example. Say you are a physician with a private practice. You are likely not competing for patients three towns over; rather, you want to attract those within a certain mile radius of your office. In that case, you will make sure to include the name of your town, city, or neighborhood in your website content, page titles, meta description, and image captions. Including these location-based keywords will help your potential customers find you more easily.

4.Keep an Eye on Customer Ratings and Reviews. So many people gain a better understanding of a business they want to visit by reading the reviews and ratings given by previous customers. But, don’t just let the reviews and ratings hang out on the internet by themselves. Take a proactive approach to customer reviews and ratings by making sure to spend time responding to each one. Customer reviews and ratings may appear on the following websites:

- Yelp
- Facebook
- Google
- And others

Proactively work with reviews and ratings by:

Responding to questions. Don’t leave a questioning potential customer hanging! Be sure to quickly respond to questions to demonstrate your excellent communication skills and trustworthiness, and get that customer into your store.
Reacting to negative reviews. Show the upset customer and potential customers observing the interaction that you care deeply about righting a wrong. Publicly ask the negative reviewer for more information, answer their questions, and do everything you can to make it right. You don’t want to gain momentum as having poor customer service or bad products.

5.Earn Valuable Backlinks. Backlinks are links to your website from another one. Having backlinks on a variety of other websites will boost your local SEO. The biggest thing to remember when building backlinks is to only agree to have a reputable website post your link. Even better — find another local business to partner with for the project! You will boost each other’s local SEO and doing so will also create a greater sense of community and collaboration. Here’s how to create valuable backlinks:

- First of all, you have to make sure that your website content is very informative and contains a variety of local SEO keywords. This makes it attractive to other reputable businesses.
- Build as big of a list as possible, as Google recognizes the quantity of links in its page rank algorithm.
- Finally, be sure the quality of backlinks is high. You do not want to be found on a website that is not producing quality local SEO. Only high-quality backlinks will serve to help your local SEO strategy.

6.Give Your Users What They Need. Providing a stellar user experience (UX) is essential to building a quality local SEO for small business campaign. Having a usable website will attract more local traffic. Conversely, if your website is difficult to navigate or contains useless information, users will not hesitate to quickly leave. Here are some ways to ensure your website is user friendly:

- Make it easy to navigate. Having a website with intuitive navigation and internal linking is critical to the user experience. Remember, if people quickly leave your site, Google is noticing that too! When your bounce rate gets too high, it indicates to Google that the user is having a bad experience on your site.
- Fast load times. Make your site load as quickly as possible so antsy potential customers aren’t compelled to leave.
- Add in photos and videos. Having elements that will interact with your potential customers will keep them engaged in your content.

Bonus Tip! Be Mobile Responsive

Your potential customers are using their smartphones to find you — whether they are planning a visit at home, are in the car, or just ran into a friend in an unfamiliar neighborhood and they are looking to find a fun place to eat. Just about 60 percent of people search for local business on their smartphone or mobile device. Building a responsive mobile site means that your website will look as good and perform just as well as your desktop website. Google even has a Mobile-Friendly Test Tool for business owners to test on their own site and gain valuable analytics into how to make their site more friendly to mobile users.

Invest in Local Business SEO Services

Local business SEO services are intended to assist small and local business owners to maximize their Google search results potential. BizIQ is a small business local SEO and digital marketing company dedicated to serving our customers. We recognize that digital marketing for local businesses can be a daunting task. We are here to help you achieve high page ranks and enhance your small business local SEO practices.

As a local marketing service, BizIQ will take the guesswork out of your SEO strategies. Our expert team is on hand to ensure your local SEO is working at its peak. We offer local SEO packages that are competitive and give you multiple tiers of local SEO company pricing to consider when hiring a digital marketing company.