If you have a local business, chances are good that you rely on foot traffic or new digital leads to remain in business. With more than 95% of today’s consumers utilizing the internet to search for local businesses, it’s now more critical than ever to establish and boost your online presence.

To produce a consistent flow of quality online traffic, your local business must execute effective locally-based SEO strategies where your customers and prospects are searching.

In this article, you’ll learn five local SEO best practices you should be implementing in your business.

1. Add FAQs to your products or services pages. Regardless of what you’re offering or selling, both non-tangible services and tangible goods, consumers will always have questions. The more completely you answer these questions, the more likely you’ll convert a prospect into a paying customer. So, on your site’s service pages, it’s important to add FAQs to answer relevant questions.

2. Focus on building backlinks. Because they are a key ranking signal to search engines, backlinks are essential for boosting your local SEO. The more relevant, authoritative backlinks you have pointing to a page on your website, the better it will do in SERPs. Some ideas for creating backlinks:

• Guest Posting
• Join a Local Radio Show
• Sponsor Local Organizations or Events.

3. Join your local chamber of commerce. Many U.S. cities have local chambers where business owners can gather to promote business interests. Your local chamber of commerce is a society of business that presents great and small business leaders with a unique opportunity to network with other like-minded business leaders. It’s a great opportunity to elevate your brand awareness.

4. Create city-specific landing pages on your website. If you conduct business in multiple cities, it may be advantageous to create city-specific landing pages to boost rankings in those territories. These city pages are designed to be full of useful content that a consumer can use to make an informed decision about your business. You should invest in high-quality pages that are unique to each city where you conduct business.

5. Embed a Google My Business map on your site. Too often, when we conduct an SEO audit for a prospect’s website, we see businesses leveraging maps incorrectly. Either they are not using them at all, or they are just using a map generator plugin that has been provided by their website builder. It’s essential to use a Google My Business embedded map to create a direct link between your website and your GMB listing to help with relevancy and proximity.

Leveraging these five tips will boost your search engine optimization success and generate new website traffic.

If you aren’t utilizing local SEO strategies, let Blue Orchid Marketing help you get started today. We can also help with every aspect of your marketing to help you get and keep customers to grow your business, including Direct Mail Marketing, a blogging program, Reputation Management, Email Marketing, or any other marketing tools.

Give us a call today at 203-746-5901 or email us at sales@BlueOrchidMarketing.com to schedule a consultation to see how we can help.