Competing with a long-established company in a local market is no child’s play. Without sharp local SEO strategies, it’s difficult to win big against businesses and service providers who are already established in the local market.
Since we have helped a lot of local business owners in Baltimore compete against established rivals through local SEO, we wanted to share some simple and actionable secrets to help you get started with SEO for free.
If your new to SEO, or simply want to learn even more about dominating SEO locally, check out our more in-depth guide to local SEO:
Local SEO checklist for 2021: Step-by-Step guide to help you Rank Locally
Why is Local SEO Important?
Local SEO helps your business stand out – even if you don’t have a website – and helps drive more traffic to your premises through online leads.
Since these leads are from people who are specifically searching for products or services that your business offers, they are also likely to give you a high conversion rate.
Searches with local intent are on the rise – with 4 in 5 consumers now using search engines to find local information, and search result information sending a massive 70% of consumers to a physical store.
Local SEO also helps drive people’s decisions in favor of your business. The more information they have about your business before they visit, the more trustworthy you are in their eyes.
Let’s dig into this!
Local SEO 101: Start with Google My Business (GMB)
If you haven’t already set up your Google My Business listing, this is a great place to start boosting your local SEO. Google My Business is considered to be a top influencing factor in terms of local search. While creating your GMB listing, make sure you completely fill your profile and tap local keywords related to your niche.
Google My Business also has the feature to publish short posts. These posts should be done frequently, similar to a social media strategy and cadence.
Our biggest tip? Each time you publish a new blog post, post it on Social media and Google My Business too 😉
Create them to tell Google that your listing deserves to be on the top spot.
Get Local with Your Content Strategy!
Everyone creates relatively “broad” content that shares the same general objective as your competitors. So, how can you make your website stand out with local SEO?
Create content that is localized towards you and your customers’ market(s).
For example: If you’re doing SEO marketing for a local restaurant in Baltimore, you may want to create content around which neighborhoods you deliver food. What local events have you been at?
Consider this: if your website is literally the Sun, your content is the gravity that will pull the visitors. Broader content may appeal to a global audience but if you wish to target a local audience, create local content on specific topics depending on your industry.
Publishing may also range from a blog for your website to content for your social media channel, whatever makes the most sense for your company. Here are 2 unique ways to win local SEO against bigger rivals:
- Make direct comparison pages or blogs: A lot of new businesses competing with a long-established player make comparison blogs, videos, and pages to lure potential customers. These are quite easy to rank. Sometimes, if the rival is impulsive, it will create a post in reply giving you free publicity.
- Create company listicles: This is also something that newbies do. Creating a post like ‘Top ______ Alternatives in CA for Big Savings’ can help put your brand on the customer’s radar. Keep your at the top with contact details. List others without contact info.
Reference unique neighborhood locations
If your business is active across the state, consider creating separate location-based pages. These location-based pages will exist on your website and will rank for unique location-specific searches. This will help optimize your business for multiple locations and will boost local SEO dramatically.
A lot of businesses make the mistake of trying to capture a lot of locations through one page. This approach to local SEO hardly works nowadays.
Instead, consider making different landing pages for each neighborhood, city or state with your services on it. These pages should read something like, “Local SEO Services for Towson, Maryland.” Keep in mind that it is ok to have duplicative content on these pages. A lot of SEO’s say this is a no-no, but our local SEO ranking solutions we conjure for our clients show results.
It sounds simple and stupid, but it works!
Local SEO Takeaways
Please note that this is what we at Frasca Digital have learned from our professional experiences over the last 5-years. We provided SEO services to websites of all maturities. Local SEO for restaurants, SEO for e-commerce websites, along with several other industries and company sizes.
Frasca Digital knows how difficult it to get started with small business local SEO strategies. Because we’re a small business too, we have a particular interest in helping new companies rank locally with SEO. This is a challenge, and there are never any guarantees with SEO, but we have created proven processes to help new websites rank fast!
Let us know in the comment section what you think about this. If you are in need of SEO Services in Baltimore, please contact us today!
