The impact of digitalization on the economy is becoming more and more visible. This means that not only large corporations have to regularly address their role in digitization, but also small SMEs. If general keywords are entered into a search engine, the same few pages usually keep appearing in the results. The use of locally significant keywords, on the other hand, offers companies of any size and scope the opportunity to become visible to the searcher. Local SEO should therefore not be neglected. In this article, we’ve put together a list of important points to be considered.
In order to link all the data on the internet about your own company as much as possible, including social media and the main page of the company, etc., it makes sense to set up a Google My Business account. Among other things, this also merges data from other Google services, such as Google Maps and Google Street View. Google works with these data links, namely they appear in the local search. In addition, users of other services often become aware of the company in this way.
Another important aspect is local citations or directories. These collect data from an industry sector. The directories are particularly trustworthy and are thus used particularly frequently by users. Companies must make sure that their information on different directories is consistent because different information is misleading for Google, which could lead to a penalty.
Although backlinks have lost importance, they are still not unimportant for Google’s evaluation of pages. In particular, reviews of other local companies can be helpful for your own company, and in the best case lead users to your website. Google takes the signal of local backlinks as a good sign.
Furthermore, it is worthwhile to collect positive reviews – get as many as possible! It’s useful for this to use not only Google reviews, but also other platforms for rating. So satisfied customers do not forget to rate you, you can politely ask them to do so. In addition, you should make sure that you respond to your customers’ ratings and comments, especially at the beginning of your business career.
However, online communication does not only take place via rating platforms; contact primarily also takes place on social media. These offer a wide open space to get closer to one’s own target group and to engage with them. The possibility of having a wider reach encourages many companies to use social media regularly. This also involves a lot of work, because regular activity is a prerequisite to having a positive influence on your company.
As mentioned at the beginning, keywords also play a vital role. Local companies benefit much more from local keywords, because this is a smaller niche that has not yet been flooded by large corporations. Furthermore, you should align your web presence to match your location, i.e. make all content a bit more specific.
