Marketing in Your Backyard: Making Use of Local SEO

Search engine optimization is vital to small businesses for connecting with clients and making sales. SEO tactics aren’t all interchangeable, though; online marketing for a local business requires special considerations that don’t come up with brands that aren’t location-specific. When seeking services for SEO in Utah, you should start with these factors.

Understanding NAP

One of the major pieces of data used by search engines when ranking businesses is your NAP: your company’s name, address, and phone number. Besides being generally useful information, search engines rely on your NAP to verify your business’s existence. How often your business is cited online, as well as where the listings are found, is one factor used for the business’s search ranking, so it’s vital that the NAP is consistent wherever it is used. SEO services and tools can find and update your business’s online listings and amend incorrect listings to improve ranking.

Using Local Search Tools

Search engines often include special sections on the front page of results for local business listings. These blocks provide significant advertising space for businesses, especially with mobile users as their search results rely even more on these listings. Getting your business in these listings and making the most of them means claiming and properly managing your Google+, Yahoo Business, and Bing Places for Business pages. This lets you keep the listing up-to-date and edit it with useful information and attractive photos to catch the attention of possible clients. Advertising agencies for SEO in Utah that have partnerships with these search engines are especially useful.

Optimizing Your Site

More than just getting listings and ad space, SEO strategies involve ensuring your site is optimized to receive clients. A mobile-friendly landing page is vital for strong search rankings, as with any other SEO campaign, and analysts can provide tools to measure your site’s load time, but keywords and metadata matter as much as the site’s performance. For local results specifically, this should focus on the geographic location of services as well as the services themselves. Referencing your business location - or locations, if there are multiple - in content such as driving directions or a contact page is a natural way to do this. Using Schema markup to put your NAP on the landing page makes it more visible to search engines, too. Even adding keywords like your city and state in page titles and header tags adds a little extra visibility, and that can be enough to place you ahead of competitors.

Networking Locally

Many businesses thrive on connecting with their local community. Establishing quality inbound links to your site is nothing new for SEO, but it becomes a new challenge when building links amidst a competitive local industry. External blogs aren’t enough alone; you want to get your site listed and linked to on a local business directory if available.

For a business seeking to stand out in a local climate, you need an online marketing agency that knows how to focus advertising towards the clients you need. For SEO in Utah, you need an agency that understands Utah, its economy, and how to stay ahead of the crowd.

The author of this article has many years of experience at writing blogs and informative articles on digital marketing companies. With its experience, he will recommend business owners to hire a PPC Management Company.