As a small business owner, you have a lot on your plate in order to keep your business running, find new customers, and deliver the best possible service to your clientele. Because there are so many moving parts that you are responsible for, things like marketing can fall by the wayside. Thankfully, there are ways that you can get more visibility for your business without spending too much time in your day working on marketing tasks.
Small business owners can get a lot of usage out of organic search marketing. This type of marketing requires some initial setup and ongoing maintenance, but most of the results are hands-free. This can free up time in your busy schedule and help you boost your online marketing initiatives. But what exactly is organic search or local SEO? In this article, we’ll give you the essential guide to organic search best practices for small business owners so you can take advantage of the benefits and help your company grow.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO is a type of marketing that improves search engine rankings and visibility for local businesses. It works best for businesses that have brick-and-mortar locations, but even digital companies can benefit from local SEO. When you have an organic search strategy in place, search engines will rank your pages and content higher in search results, so you get more organic traffic and visibility online.
Organic search are the links that appear on a search engine results page that aren’t paid advertisements. They are the answer to a query asked in the search engine, and appear as a company name, a URL, a highlighted link, and a short description of the page the link will open to.
For queries that have specific search tags for locations, such as asking for “pet salons near me” or “home contractors in my area”, the results may pull up business listings with mapped locations localized to the area of the searcher. These results are also part of organic search, as they are generated thanks to organic search efforts, not paid advertisements.
What Factors Determine Your Visibility in Local Organic Search Results?
There are a few different places that Google and other search engines will look to find the results that are popular for local organic search. Here are a few of those factors that need to play into your organic search strategies:
Google Business Profile
A Google Business Profile, formerly known as Google My Business, is the most important online directory listing a small business can have. A Google Business Profile is a free listing that any small business can claim. It will have all the information relevant to your business, like your name, location, hours of operation, phone number, website link, reviews, and many other important areas for local search results.
Business Directories
While your Google Business Profile is the most important online listing, it’s not the only one. Other business directories have a role to play in other search engine results and even in Google search page results. Finding online directories that are relevant to your business and making sure that you have filled them out helps you rank higher than your competitors.
Social Media Profiles
Another place where search engines will pull information from to use in local search results is your social media profiles. When you list your location in the profile section on Facebook, X, Instagram, or any other social media platform, search engines will use that information to help deliver results for local SEO searches.
Website Design
Finally, search engines like Google will look at your website pages and design to find information about your location to use in search results. Your website can have local tags on it like keywords, maps, or branch location pages to help search engines learn where your business is located and use it as an option in ranking for local search queries.
Benefits of Appearing in Organic Search Results
There are some great benefits of prioritizing organic search as a strategy for your small business. Here are some of the results you can get from local SEO.
Great Online Visibility
Get more eyes on your business and your website pages. Organic search helps you get discovered by a wider audience who searches for relevant information around your business.
Outrank Your Competitors
Show up higher in search engine results pages than your competitors. By outranking them, you are more likely to get clicks, leads, and sales than competitors that don’t focus on local SEO.
Drive More Traffic to Your Website
Get more page visits and website traffic by appearing higher in search results for organic search. The more visitors you get to your website, the more likely you are to convert them into customers.
Educate Customers
Explain your value to customers so they are more likely to buy from you. Use organic search to rank high for educational topics and relevant terms that can help you teach your customers why your business is worth their time and money.
Local SEO Tips
Now that you know what local SEO is and why it matters, let’s take a look at some tips that can help you learn the most valuable organic search best practices for small business owners.
Improve Your Google Business Profile
As mentioned above, your Google Business Profile is the most important directory to use online for your business. By taking the time to improve your profile and fill it out completely, you can boost your business above competitors on search engine results pages. Make sure your information is completely filled in, and regularly update your page with photos, reviews, and new hours of operation.
Be Active on Social Media
Social media is another place where your information is used to pull and populate search results pages. By posting regularly, you prove to search engines that you are active and a good source for local organic search results. You can also use those same posts on your Google Business Profile for even better results.
Maintain Consistency
Search engines are looking for consistent and reliable sources of information to use in organic search results. Maintaining consistency on your website, social media profiles, and online directories goes a long way in proving your authority to search engines. Make sure business information like your name, address, and phone number is consistent across all platforms.
Claim Your Business in Directories
Don’t leave any directories or online business listings unclaimed. Find directories for your local area, industry, and different search engines and fill them out and claim them. Optimize your presence there with photos, reviews, and other important information related to local SEO, like your locations and your areas of service.
Optimize Your Website Pages
The back-end data on your website also plays a role in your rankings on organic search results pages. Things like your URL structure, title tags, headers, meta descriptions, and website content are all scanned by search engine algorithms and used to populate local SEO searches.
Add Location Pages to Your Website
If your business operates in different zip codes, communities, or neighborhoods, make sure to put that information on your website. Having localized pages for different locations helps you get discovered in more areas for local search queries, as each page can be used as a result in different “near me” searches.
Create Local Content
Local content is any content related to your community or local area. Videos, images, and news articles that mention your location all help boost your local content creation and are used by search engines for local SEO results. It can also help improve your reputation in your local community.
Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Most people search on their mobile devices, not on desktop computers. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it can hurt your chances of ranking high and converting leads. A mobile-friendly website will help you increase your visibility online and create a better experience for your customers.
Engage with Your Local Community
Get links from other sources to improve your relevancy and authority search signals to engines like Google. By having backlinks to other local businesses, it also helps solidify your location to search algorithms and gives you more authority for local SEO search results.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
At Surefire Local, we understand how important it is for you as a small business owner to find new business and still have time in your day for other tasks. That’s why we provide business intelligence marketing software at a fraction of the cost of other services or agencies.
Surefire Local can help you improve your local SEO and organic search best practices, along with helping you manage all of your other essential marketing tasks all on one platform. To learn more, get a demo of Surefire Local today and discover all the ways we can help you run your small business marketing strategies.