You're a small local shop, and you know that no one ever looks at yellow pages anymore. So, your customers are likely searching for your kind of business online. Because of this, you want to rank high in Google's Search. But you’re on a small budget and SEO's Professionals are too expensive for you. What should you do?
Today we are going to break down a simple DIY guide to gain massive organic traffic through SEO and content marketing.
The first thing we recommend is to leverage Google My Business. Now there's a few steps you need to take. The first step is you have to claim your Google My Business profile. That way people know it's your business, and not someone else's.
After you claim your business, you’ll need to have a strategy to attract reviews. If you don't get reviews, you're not going to do well on Google My Business. The easiest strategy you can implement is to simply ask your clients to review you on Google My Business. Remember, not everyone knows how to use Google My Business and leave a review. It’s a good idea to have a printed handout to give a customer after a transaction. It can have some simple instructions as well.
Don’t like the idea of manually asking for reviews? Let Watson Media set your business up with an automated review solution.
Always answer positive and negative reviews. It doesn't matter if it's positive or a negative, you want to give your response there as well. You want to acknowledge the negative reviews and answer them politely, and work to make them better. In other words, let them know how you're going to fix it. Don't just be like, "Oh, you're wrong, you're off." The more negative you are and the more you fight fire with fire, it's not going to work well.
Secondly, we recommend adding videos to your listing. A virtual tour, a video intro, a video of your staff, 30 seconds max is all you need. Keeping it short and to the point will help you do really well with the short attention span of today’s internet users. Not a lot of small businesses are leveraging the powers of video. By leveraging videos you're much more likely to get a leg up against the competition.
Thirdly, you need to add photos. Photos of your physical location, inside and outside. That way people can spot it from the outside, but they also can see what it's like ahead of time. Keep it simple, photos of your staff and how friendly they are work great. Remember, these photos will be a reflection of your business. So, make sure who you photograph are smiling. If they don't have a smile and they're all depressed or sad, who's going to want to come to your business? Photograph your most popular products, your items, food, or whatever it maybe you offer. You could use photos of customers hanging out and enjoying themselves.
By doing those three tips, you're going to do to much better with Google My Business and outrank your competition. Most people who utilize Google My Business, fail by not leveraging half these features. They think it’s enough to just claim their profile, and then they're just asking people to leave reviews. So, if you go above and beyond, and you do all those steps, you're going to surpass your competition.
Now that you've optimized your Google My Business listing, it’s time to take a look at the structure of your website & make sure its setup for success. On your home page, it’s important to have a basic idea of your services. This needs to be clearly stated above the fold. Beneath that, you want two to four paragraphs about your business. It can be simple such as what you do, how many years you've been in business and what sets you apart from your competitors. You can also go into details about the areas you serve & provide a Google Map showing where you're located. Another excellent use of this space is a video explainer of your business, or a video breaking down what it's like to be at your business. You can use the same video in the Google My Business on your home page as well. And importantly, on your home page you need to have information on your opening hours. A lot of small businesses forget that. It can be really irritating to a potential customer when they don't have it available.
Once you've done that you need to create location pages. Even though you operate in one city, there's probably other surrounding cities where you offer service or people are coming from to your business, right? So, we need to take all those surrounding cities into account. For example, we are located in Volusia County, but Volusia is very big. So, we have created location-based pages for Ormond Beach, Daytona Beach, Port Orange, New Smyrna Beach etc etc.
The next thing we recommend you to do is add as many services pages as possible. If you offer 10 services, create 10 service pages on your website. If you only have two services, create two service pages. Each page should be a specific service because it'll allow you to rank for that which will get you more traffic.
Next, create a reviews page on your website. Make sure you're using proper Schema Markup, cause there's Schema Markup for reviews. This way when people are searching on Google, they can actually see the star rating and reviews, which helps your listing stand out and get more clicks.
Next, apply the other Schema Markups at the same time. Cause if you're already going to use the review ones might as well use the local business Schema Markup.
Did you know that Restaurants and lawyers have their own Schema Markup? It's also a good point to use Geo Coordination's Markup, and if you have opening hours you can also use that through Schema Markup as well.
After you do that, create content for your static services pages. Go in depth describing your services. What sets you apart? Why is your services amazing? You should discuss people on your team, what kind of qualifications do they have that makes your company better? How many years have you been in business? The tools & the technologies that you're using through your services. What are the use cases? What are testimonials? All of this ends up making your services stand out so they're going to rank better.
And last but not least, for an extra boost, we recommend content marketing for your local site. At a minimum, we recommended posting a high-quality piece of content once a month. And when possible, in your content, mention things like your location, people, land mark, events, neighborhoods, institution, this helps improve the signal to Google that you're a local, relevant business.
We hope you have enjoyed some of these DIY tips on how attract more Organic Traffic through the Search Engines. We understand the time and effort it takes into implementing these tasks and are always happy to complete these tasks for you. Give us a call, text or email any time to discuss your small business marketing needs.
