They’re around you on almost a daily basis. You stand next to them in line at your favorite coffee shop. You eat near them as you have lunch outside of the office. You may even live around them. They’re all potential customers for your company, but if you’re investing all of your digital marketing dollars on reaching the internet as a whole, you may never reach those closest to you. That's why web design is so important for local SEO.
Local SEO is the best marketing method to reach those who might actually stop by or call your local business, but few companies today know how to connect with them. As the premier West Palm Beach web design agency, we’ve worked with hundreds of companies just like yours to master local SEO, and over the years, we’ve discovered a few key elements the sites that tend to dominate this arena have in common. Take a look.
Google My Business represents a huge opportunity for local companies to connect with nearby customers. It’s a free tool, and it allows you to manage how your company appears in Google Search and on maps. This tool gives you the ability to add your business name, designate its location, and create a list of hours so customers know when they can stop by and reach you.
It also allows you to see and reply to customer reviews, put photos of your company up, and learn more about how people search for you. A 2018 Google report found that 46% of all searches had local intent, and those numbers have significantly increased since then. By claiming and taking control of your My Business profile, you’re able to instantly connect with those searchers who have local intent. Make certain that once you’ve claimed it, you update it with new photos, events, and changing hours on a regular basis.
Additionally, it does you little good if you don’t integrate your new listing into your efforts on your own web development. West Palm Beach customers are far more likely to find you if it’s all connected.
If you’re unfamiliar with the terminology, structured data is any kind of data that you’ve carefully organized and structured on a web page. When it comes to local SEO, you’ve structured the data on your pages with specific tags around text and images that help search engines understand and better read that information so they can return accurate results to local customers.
You’ll want to implement geo coordinates, your physical address, and reviews to help improve your performance when it comes to local optimization. Structured data means search results that are easier for your customers to read, more informative, and generally more attractive. This can be tough to make happen on your own if you’re not a web developer, but by letting your West Palm Beach web design team know more about your local SEO goals, it should be fairly easy to build into your site.
If you’re aiming for a younger crowd, optimizing for voice search is absolutely essential. Voicebot.Ai has reported that 77% of those in the 18-34 age demographic use voice search on their phones on a regular basis. Wondering how voice search is different? When people use Siri, Alexa, or any other option, they tend to use natural language to search. Optimizing for those relevant keywords and phrases they might use during voice search can help you perform better with local customers.
These don’t just tend to be long-tail keywords, which are important to local search, but also entire questions. For example, in a web search on a phone, someone might type in “best pizza place in West Palm Beach.” In a voice search, however, they may ask “What is a pizza place in West Palm Beach everyone loves?” Optimize for that term, and you instantly access more customers.
How long have the experts been suggesting content is king? Maybe there’s a reason behind that. Good content that is continually updated has been absolutely essential for more than a decade now, and that’s still true, even as you work to dominate the world of Local SEO. Compelling content keeps people on your pages much longer, and the longer they stay, the more Google is likely to notice just how powerful you are.
It’s fairly easy to incorporate good content into your website too. You’ll want to routinely invest in high-quality articles based on the ideas that people want to investigate through you. Make sure that content is engaging to readers and indicative of your expertise as well.
For example, if you run a local pest control company, you’ll want to highlight your unique approach to problems West Palm Beach business owners face on a regular basis like lizards and iguanas invading homes and businesses through vents and pipes.
As you think about building out your content base, though, don’t just think about blogs and articles. Think about photo storytelling, video content, and even podcast content to help customers understand that you truly are the local authority within your industry and to help search engines recognize that as well.
It’s going to be a bit tough to connect with local customers if they can’t find you. As you work on your web development, West Palm Beach customers are going to want to find you, so make it easy for them to do so. Add an About Us page that details your location.
If you have more than one location, be sure to add a page for each location. Don’t forget, too, to claim local listings like those on the local Chamber of Commerce page, Yelp, Bing, and Yellowpages.com. The more listings you have, the more likely potential customers are to be able to find you.
You have a business to run, and while you might want to dominate local SEO with a better web design, that can be difficult to do if you’re working to serve your customers. Fortunately, we can help.
Offering great web design that is carefully optimized for local, visually eye-catching, and destined for excellent performance as your top digital marketing tool, we can help you reach more people than you ever thought possible. Contact us today for an assessment of your current marketing practices and a closer look at how we can help.