How to Do Seo for Local Business

How to Do Seo for Local Business – Successful local SEO is a process that starts with a foundation, then continues through a series of steps. Each of these steps contributes to a big picture of a successful local SEO strategy. While some application of the techniques and principles will change from business to business, there are some universal elements that can be applied regardless of your business type or industry.

If you are wondering how you could build an seo agency for small businesses, keep reading on.

Table of Contents

Create a Google My Business account

The first step to improving SEO for your local business is claiming your Google My Business account.

Creating a Google My Business account helps ensure you show up in:

Google local search results
Google Maps
Google Search Knowledge Panel

You’ll also want to optimize your listing to get the best results.

To get started optimizing your Google My Business:

Verify your business ownership
Provide up-to-date information about your products and services, location, hours of operation, and payment methods
Add your logo and images to give searchers an inside look at your business
Share regular posts about product updates, events, and special offers
Encourage and respond to Google reviews

Claiming and optimizing your Google My Business listing will help you show up in local search results and boost your local SEO.

OPTIMIZE YOUR HOMEPAGE.

Your homepage should very clearly state who you are, where you’re located and what you do. Make it easy on Google to understand these elements of your business. Your page title tag, header tag and meta description should clearly state this information. If you’re using WordPress to build your website, you can easily update your website page title tag under Settings > General in the left navigation. You can also easily load your page meta data via the Yoast SEO plugin, which brings me to my next point.

OPTIMIZE YOUR META DATA.

There has been a lot of debate over whether or not page title tags and meta descriptions are still relevant. Now whether or not they are still a ranking factor (which page title tags will trump meta descriptions), they are still a HUGE element in the first impression your web page has on a potential visitor. If you’re focusing on optimizing for local SEO, your page title tags should include the name of the city that you want to be focused on. Optimize your page title tags to include the name of the city and the product or service you offer. This will help to not only tell search engines “this is where you can find me” but it also clearly states “and this is what I do in this location.” Which rolls nicely into the next topic for discussion…

Build local citations and ensure NAP consistency

In addition to claiming your GMB listing, you’ll also want to build local citations on sites like:

When optimizing your citations, be sure to include:

Your business name, address, and phone number (NAP)
Description of your business
Link to your website

Learn more about building local citations, and check out our proprietary LocalFX software for help managing your local listings and SEO.

Encourage reviews from local customers

Next on our list of SEO for local business tips is encouraging customer reviews.

Earning reviews from local customers helps optimize your Google My Business listing — and reviews add social proof that encourages people to buy.

To earn reviews on Google, you can:

Create a link to help customers find and review your business
Add the URL above to your website and marketing materials and remind customers to review your local business
Respond to reviews to build trust with customers

In addition to earning reviews on Google, you can encourage people to review your local business on your website, social media, and third-party review sites. For more tips on earning reviews, check out this page.

Reviews impact SEO rankings for local businesses, and responding to reviews boosts your trustworthiness in the eyes of leads. So, earning reviews is essential when it comes to SEO for local businesses.Good agencies have more than 50 testimonials.Great agencies have more than 100 testimonials.WebFX has over 785+ glowing client testimonials.See what makes us stand out

CREATE A PAGE FOR EVERY PRODUCT, SERVICE AND LOCATION.

Stop trying to consolidate, it’s not helpful for SEO and it’s not helpful for local SEO. In order to apply product/service schema to each of your individual product/service offerings, they have to have their own page. So not only is this an overall SEO best practice, as it helps to paint a more clear sitemap for search engines and also helps your product/service pages rank for that specific offering, it opens the door to specific schema applications. Below are all of our service offerings, which can be found in our sitemap. If we had one page that said “Our Services” and no other individualized pages, do you think we’d ever rank for Local SEO or Social Media or Web Design with a web page labeled “Our Services?” Doubtful.

Conduct local keyword research

Keyword research is crucial for successful local SEO campaigns.

With keyword research, you can uncover keywords and phrases local customers search to find businesses, products, and services like yours.

To start researching local SEO keywords, we recommend using tools like:

These tools will give you insights into metrics like monthly search volume, cost per click, and competition, so you can choose the keywords that are most valuable for your business.

When conducting keyword research, try to focus on long-tail, local keywords. Long-tail keywords —three or more words — often have lower competition, making them easier to rank for. Also, it’s easier to determine search intent — the reason someone searches a particular phrase — for long-tail phrases.

For example, if someone searches “Harrisburg restaurants,” it’s not immediately clear what type of restaurant they’re looking for. However, if someone searches, “best Thai food restaurant in Harrisburg pa,” you know exactly what they want to find.

Understanding search intent helps you create local SEO content that best matches a searcher’s query, giving you a better chance of ranking at the top of results.

USE LOCAL BUSINESS, ORGANIZATION, PRODUCT & SERVICE SCHEMA.

At the very least, you should apply local business schema, or structured data markup to every web page to optimize your website for local SEO. It’s near impossible to get into the infamous Google Local Pack without this. Local schema is additional code that you can add to the pages of your website to make it easier for search engines to understand who you are, what you do, where you’re located and how you may be relevant to people who might be searching for your type of products or services.

Adding product and service schema to your website focuses more on the details of each of those products or services. Again, the entire mindset behind schema is speaking to a robot (search engines) in their own language. Simplify things for them. Yes, they might understand English, but it’s their second language. So speak to them in their language for optimal local search results.

If you have schema on your site, or you’re not sure, you can also test a URL on Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool and see the break down of various schemas on your website. Here’s an example of the schema listed on our web design page (local business, services and reviews):

CLAIM YOUR GOOGLE MY BUSINESS PAGE.

We’ve had plenty of run-ins with Google My Business (GMB), so if you find yourself banging your head against a brick wall, you’re not alone. However, claiming your business listing and filling out the content for it is essential to your local SEO listing — especially for your Google Local Pack and SERP results. Don’t get discouraged if your business category isn’t listed, while there are over 2,000 categories, they have some weird ones, so try your best to find the fit that makes the most sense for your business. Use both primary and LSI keywords wherever you can as you fill out your content as this counts for almost 20% of your chance of getting into the Local Pack.

Again, if you have multiple locations, do yourself a favor and claim each of your GMBs. You can manage them all from one login, so it won’t be a headache to update, but yes, you need to own each physical location for your business.

Create location-based content

After conducting keyword research, you need to create content to rank in local search results.

Creating location-based pages and blog posts allows you to:

Demonstrate authority in your local area
Target local keywords
Rank at the top of local search results
Share local industry news and events
Keep searchers in the know about important business updates
Encourage purchases from local customers
Inspire customer loyalty and repeat purchases

If your business has multiple locations, make sure to create unique content, so local searchers can find and visit your location closest to them.

Content is one of the most important elements of our local SEO checklist — and it’s essential for boosting your local rankings.

SETUP SOCIAL MEDIA SIGNALS.

If you don’t have a Facebook business page, you should now. Having social media signals pointing to your location is another bonus when it comes to ranking for local SEO. You don’t necessarily have to do a lot with it, but the sheer existence of the page is better than nothing. However, ideally you’ll have a social media strategy that will help you to manage content for multiple locations, if that’s relevant to your business.

Optimize for voice search

Today, voice searches account for nearly half of all online searches.

This means if your site isn’t optimized for voice search, you’re missing out on valuable local leads and revenue.

For local searches especially, more and more people use voice search to find businesses near them.

Many voice search optimization strategies overlap with local SEO tactics, so you can save time and money by optimizing your site for voice and traditional search.

Here are a few voice search optimization tips to help you get started:

Focus on targeting long-tail, local keywords related to your business.

For example, if you’re an Italian restaurant, you could create content to target the phrase “best Italian restaurant in [your location].” This will help your site appear in voice search results and traditional local SEO results.

Optimize for Position Zero (P0) — the first search result that appears above organic listings.

Voice search devices pull information directly from Position Zero results and featured snippets, so optimizing your content for P0 will help you rank in more voice search results.

Create easy-to-digest content that directly answers searchers’ questions.

Breaking your content into 2-3 sentence paragraphs and using bullet points when possible is an excellent strategy for earning a P0 spot in search results.

In addition, directly answering searchers’ queries will help you rank at the top of search results since Google wants to show results that provide the best user experience (UX).

To learn more about voice search optimization for your local business, check out our top-rated voice search SEO services.

Earn high-quality backlinks from local companies

Creating local content is also a great way to earn backlinks from reputable companies in your area.

Google looks at the number and quality of backlinks to your website when ranking local content. So, it’s important to expand your link portfolio by earning links from other high-authority sites.

When you create quality local content, it’s an opportunity for businesses in your area to link to pages on your site naturally. You can also reach out to industry leaders and bloggers in your niche and ask if they’ll share and link to your content.

Earning reputable backlinks will help your site appear higher in local search results, and it also increases awareness of your brand.

PRIORITIZE REVIEWS.

As you grow your business, you will want “votes of validation” that you are who you say you are, you do what you say you do and you are located where you say you’re located. It’s a bonus if people have rave reviews about your products and services as well. However, reviews are a great way to do this. When search engines are trying to figure out what the best results might be for a certain search inquiry, they’re going to look at a number of factors in their algorithm and the number of reviews you have on Google, Yelp and Facebook are all going to be part of that consideration process.

Yelp is always going to appear on the first page of Google. So play the game. Work on building your Yelp reviews as well as your Google reviews. Building up reviews on a the top search engine in the world, yes, always a good idea. And your Facebook page is likely to appear on the first page of Google when your brand name is searched for as well, so build up those reviews to help position you in a positive light! While reviews may not be on your physical website, they are a great way to optimize your website for local SEO.

Make your site mobile responsive

More than half of online traffic comes from mobile devices. So, you’ll want to make sure your SEO for local business strategy includes responsive design.

With Google’s mobile-first indexing, responsive design is more important than ever for making sure your local business ranks at the top of search results.

Responsive design ensures your content displays correctly, no matter the device someone uses to access your site. This means people who use mobile phones or tablets will enjoy the same great experience as desktop users.

Not only does responsive design impact your local SEO rankings, but it’s also necessary for boosting conversions.

By 2021, more than 70% of U.S. ecommerce sales will come from mobile devices. If your site isn’t optimized to provide a great mobile experience, shoppers will waste no time hitting the back button.

If you want to reach and convert local customers, you need to implement this SEO for local business tip.

But how do you know if your site is mobile responsive? Start by entering your URL into a tool like WebFX’s mobile SEO Checker or Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

If you’re not happy with the results, WebFX can help! Check out our responsive design services, or contact us to learn more.

Stay active on social media

While social media may not directly impact your rankings, social media marketing can support your SEO strategy in several ways.

Here are just a few ways social media impacts local business SEO and conversions:

Social media increases your brand awareness online
Social media helps you send traffic to your website and blog
Social media helps you earn more backlinks from local influencers
Social media helps you earn and respond to more reviews
Social media boosts trust signals with potential customers
Social media helps you develop meaningful relationships that lead to purchases

To get started with social media for your local business, you can easily create profiles on social media sites like:

Not sure what to share on social media? Here are a few ideas:

Your local SEO content and blog posts
Local news and industry updates
Updates about community events you’re sponsoring
User-generated content from local customers
Interactive polls and quizzes to engage local leads and followers
Links to purchase

These ideas just scratch the surface, so feel free to view our social media services and connect with our team for personalized recommendations for your local business.

Sell SEO Services

Even if you’re an experienced SEO specialist, having the cadence to sell SEO services can make a big difference between a successful agency and one that’s barely making the cut. Everything boils down to defining your SEO sales process.

Learn how to sell SEO to businesses and provide your agency with a repeatable process and tactics that lead to more revenue.

Establish Your SEO Pricing Structure

One of the things prospects will ask from you is how much your SEO costs. You’ll find different answers to this question, and it may get confusing if you’re not familiar with the value of SEO.

How do you justify the cost of your SEO to clients? Start by defining your SEO pricing structure.

SEO companies use three types of pricing structures for their services:

Hourly: Agencies often apply this pricing structure for minor SEO tasks, such as keyword research and website audits.
Fixed: This can be ideal for projects that include a combination of SEO work – from on-page optimization to SEO consulting services. Those who expand to other services consider a fixed pricing structure, such as when pricing their website design services.
Retainer: Established agencies often put their clients on a monthly retainer pricing model that fits their budget and digital marketing needs.

As you start your SEO agency, it’s best to choose a fixed and hourly pricing structure before moving to retainer fees. Before you do that, research. Know the level of competition for the industry you’re planning to serve. Your pricing should also match the capability of your agency to deliver. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by asking a steep price for your SEO services and overpromising—then make the mistake of underdelivering.

Find Your Clients

Your first clients are likely the following: referrals, prospects you’ve met at industry events, people within your personal and professional network, and people you’ve met on social networks (LinkedIn or Facebook groups).

Finding clients coincides with your inbound and outbound initiatives that we’ve discussed in the previous steps. The more visible your agency is, the more opportunities you have of connecting to businesses that need SEO services.

A few things you can do to make it easier to find clients (or them to find you):

Download the SEO Audit Widget. Every time a prospect enters their details on the audit widget form on your website, they get a free SEO audit. In turn, you get their email.
Ask for referrals. A good word or two about your SEO company can spur prospects into getting your service.
Cold call with conviction. Prepare a script, pick up the phone, and start calling businesses in your local directory.

Note: Take the time to get to know your clients before you reach out. This will help you match your sales approach to the type of client you’re facing.

Qualify Your Leads

A common mistake startup SEO agencies – even some of the established ones – make is selling SEO to everyone.

Why? Two reasons: 1) It’s a waste of time; 2) Not all prospects are right for your SEO company.

This is where qualifying leads come in.

Qualifying your leads allow you to focus on the right prospects based on four factors: Budget, Need, Authority, and Timeframe (BANT).

These factors entail whether your prospect can afford your services, has a definite need for your expertise, has the power to make decisions, and is ready to buy from you.

Develop a Set of Probing Questions

Probing questions allow you to determine the needs of your prospects and whether they’re right for your agency. Some of the questions to ask SEO clients are:

Did you work with an SEO company before?
How satisfied are you with your current SEO agency?
What are your main challenges? How did you resolve these?
Do you have a marketing budget?
How do you measure SEO success?

Pro-tip: Use this client questionnaire template as a guide when developing your questions.

Know When to Say No

As much as you want to take on all prospects and their requests, you have to face the reality that you can’t do everything—even more so if you’re running a small SEO business. This is where you draw the line.

Set high standards at the beginning and stick to them. It may seem a bit absurd to say no to SEO clients (because why would you turn away business, right?), but this allows you to prioritize leads who are more likely to convert.

The entire qualifying phase revolves around this. If you deem a prospect not fit or may not need your services now, you can put them into a nurturing campaign until they’re ready to become your clients.

Pitch to Your SEO Prospects

A strong pitch is a combination of a great amount of prep, an SEO proposal that sells itself, and a good rapport with your prospect.

Do Your Prep

Think of this as doing your homework—or what we call Step 0.

Your prep allows you to develop a pitch around your client, not around your SEO agency.

What are their business and industry? What are their common pain points? What solutions do they need?

Everything you need to learn about the client to help them find the right solution and position yourself as the agency of their choice happens in prep.

Create a Proposal That Sells Itself

Your SEO business proposal is your agency’s value proposition in print. It includes information about your client, the details of your SEO methodology, your proposed SEO solution, and the timeline and deliverables.

It’s best to have a template for your SEO business proposal, so you can simply plug in the information. This saves you time on building an SEO proposal from scratch.

Supplement your SEO proposal with marketing materials to reinforce the value of your SEO service. Send them a pitch deck, a comprehensive competitor analysis, case studies, or even white papers. This helps in demonstrating the impact of your SEO service on their business.

Build Rapport

A strong rapport with prospects allows you to have a stronger influence on their buying decision. Not only does this show effort in building a good relationship, but it also helps you establish trust. As you get the hang of running your startup SEO agency, you should also dedicate time to learning a few rapport-building techniques:

Common ground
Cheerleading
Humor
Mirroring
Me-Talk

Close Your SEO Prospects

You’ve pitched and talked to clients. Now, it’s time to close.

There’s one rule we always reinforce when it comes to closing: Once you’ve said your closing pitch, STOP TALKING. The first one to speak loses.

That said, make sure that you’re closing line is strong because this sets the tone on whether a client will accept or reject you. Learning sales closing techniques can help you determine what’s the best to say as you end your pitch:

Sell the benefit of your service.
Close by scheduling your next conversation (assumptive close).
End with a question that offers them a limited choice (assertive close).

IMPORTANT: In any pitch, there will be objections on price, the value of the service, or even SEO horror stories. Learn how to overcome these objections so you can solidify your pitch.

Retain Your Clients

Closing a prospect doesn’t mean you stop trying to win their business. You need to provide value and build desire consistently and continuously to make them stay with your SEO agency.

The moment you stop building their desire to work with you is the moment you lose clients. This can affect your SEO business because of lost credibility and relationship. Client retention lays the groundwork for your startup agency to scale. It drives repeat business and predictable revenue, so you can eventually attain a seven-digit earning SEO agency.

Checklist: Things You Need to Accomplish

Before moving to the final steps, make sure you’ve ticked off the following:

Establish your SEO pricing structure
Download the SEO audit widget
Ask for referrals
Cold call
Qualify your leads
Develop a set of probing questions
Say no to clients who are not the right fit for your agency
Do your prep before pitching
Create an SEO proposal and other marketing materials for your pitch
Learn rapport building techniques
Learn closing techniques
Write down the different ways to keep clients

Make your own website

You wouldn’t start an accountancy practice after reading a couple of books about taxes, so you shouldn’t start an SEO business after reading a few SEO guides. Knowing the theory isn’t enough; you need hands-on experience before you start offering services to businesses.

How do you get experience? Create your own website and use it as a testing ground for your SEO skills.

This is what I did.

In 2012, I started a fitness blog. It was nothing special, but it was getting upwards of 50,000 organic visitors per month after just ten months.

Even better, it was making some nice affiliate commissions from Amazon.

Now, I should probably mention that starting a website isn’t the only way to get hands-on experience. Another option is to find a reputable agency and learn on the job. However, as you’re reading this guide, you’re probably more entrepreneurially-minded and don’t want to work for someone else. In which case, starting a website is the only option.

Scale your business

Building an SEO business takes a lot of time and effort. I’m making it sound simple in this blog post, but there will be many unknowns along the way. You’re unlikely to build a million-dollar agency overnight.

For that reason, my advice is not to concern yourself with “scaling” or hiring staff until your revenue is in the mid-five figures per year.

That’s not to say that you should shy away from hiring freelancers or virtual assistants (VAs) in the early days of your business. It’s wise to delegate tasks when things start gaining traction and you’re feeling overwhelmed. But in my opinion, it’s not wise to hire full-time employees until your cash flow is stable and you’re confident you can actually afford to keep them on.

If you’re not yet at that stage, keep grinding. I know from experience that it probably won’t happen as fast as you’d like.

If you are at that stage, you have two options:

Keep things as they are
Start hiring and scaling your business

Given the constant “hustle” mentality in the industry, I think it’s important to remind ourselves that the first option actually exists. Not everyone wants to scale their business to six or seven figures per year. If you’re happy with your turnover and workload as an SEO freelancer, there’s no shame whatsoever in keeping things that way.

This is precisely why I never ended up “selling” to the email list I mentioned earlier. It took me a while to realize this, but I never really wanted to start an SEO agency. I was quite happy working for a few clients and having a comfortable life.

But let’s say that you do want to scale your business; how do you do it?

In theory, it’s simple:

Productize your services
Hire people

Productizing your services is where you standardize your offering and create a repeatable, step-by-step process for delivering it to clients. It’s beneficial because it makes services easier to deliver and makes it easier to hire staff.

Speaking of staff, that’s the second part of the equation.

It’s impossible to scale your business without bringing other people on board because you only have so many hours in the day.

Conclusion

With the growing number of online businesses, it is inevitable that more and more small enterprises would spring up. Local business owners who want to compete in terms of visibility and boosting sales thru SEO may feel discouraging at times. However, such is something they should not be worried about because they can easily succeed if they’d put some effort into optimizing their websites. A truly optimized website means it will be easily found online by customers and this means more revenues and opportunities for you to attract prospects and customers.

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