Local SEO can make the difference for whether a small brick and mortar shop makes a profit or has to close its doors permanently. If done right, the profits from all the extra leads can be a major boon. If done wrong, the investment can be both a waste of time and money. So to save you from a loss in this article we will share common local SEO mistakes which people generally do.
No business has an unlimited marketing budget. So, you need to make sure you use your or your clients’ budgets wisely.
Small But Costly Errors
Making mistakes with local SEO can be very expensive in either a general lack of ROI or missed opportunities. Even small mistakes can be extremely detrimental to your bottom line.
Here are three potentially expensive local SEO mistakes that are easily avoidable.
Ignoring Off-Page Work
Having a well-designed local business website is, of course, a very important part of your digital marketing efforts. But, it’s not the only part. SEO work that is done off-site, or on other websites other than the business site itself, is extremely valuable as well.
One of the most commonly overlooked and rather inexpensive off-page SEO strategies is to create citations for the business and business website.
A citation is basically the publishing of the business’s name, address, and phone number on another website. Sometimes a link to the business site in included as well. This is why citations are often referred to as NAP+W.
These citations go on sites likes Yelp, Yellowpages, and local business organization websites. The major value of creating them is that they help push your website into the very valuable local 3-pack in Google search results.
Best of all, they are fairly easy to create and you can even outsource the work for very reasonable rates.
Ignoring Local Content
Most business owners want their website to focus on the services they provide, and for good reason. If a customer doesn’t know what services a business offers, they have no reason to contact that business.
However, these business owners also rarely understand the intricacies of SEO. That means if left to their own devices they would seldom if ever include local content on their website.
The benefit of adding local content is two-fold.
First, it allows you to not only include the town or city the business is based in into the content of the site, but you can also mention and discuss many of the surrounding areas the business serves as well. You can’t do that by only placing an address in the footer.
Second, landing pages for provided services are great for paid traffic, but they are not so good for SEO. By adding local content you can frame a business as a general resource for the residents in those areas.
Local content is a relatively low-cost way to greatly increase the size of the top of your digital marketing funnel allowing you to generate many more leads.
Ignoring Mobile UX/UI
For the layperson, UX/UI is short for User Experience and User Interface. It’s an important aspect of both websites and mobile applications. But, it’s extremely important for the mobile version of local business websites.
Most modern websites are built to be responsive or mobile friendly. That means they automatically resize the text and relocate certain fields to ensure that when the website is visited from a mobile device like a tablet or smartphone it’s rendered in such a way as to be more easily read and navigated.
But, just because a website is responsive does not automatically mean it’s as user-friendly as possible.
Mobile UX/UI is important to owners of local businesses because many potential customers first find the store or restaurant’s website via their mobile device. For example, someone running errands or visiting friends might decide they want to grab a meal.
They don’t drive to a library to use the Internet on a public desktop. Instead, they take their smartphone out of their pocket and search for restaurants near their current location.
A well designed mobile UX/UI does a few things. It stops users from bouncing right away due to an unappealing and difficult to use site.
It gets them to engage and start researching the business. And most importantly, it gets the potential customer to convert either by making a phone call, scheduling a reservation or appointment, or filling out a contact form.
Getting users onto your site is useless unless you can get them to convert.
In Summary
Local SEO can quite literally make or break a business that services local areas. When done correctly, the ROI can be astounding. When ignored or done poorly, it can be a total waste of your precious marketing dollars.
When building a new website for your local business, it’s important to have a clear vision of what you want for that site as well as how you are going to leverage that site for maximum results.
Avoid the above three common local SEO mistakes and watch your business prosper.
In this modern era, SEO is an must do option for business because these days people don’t like to go shop or showroom. they love to see everything from home or office!
Thanks for highlighting these 3 common mistakes.