If you run a small business, chances are you’ve heard the phrase “SEO” thrown a lot lately. It’s an essential business practice that can help your business to stand out from the crowd online. E-commerce is becoming an increasingly saturated market and it’s important that you do whatever you can to help your brand stand out from the ever growing crowd. So, let’s take a moment to really get to grips with this practice and to understand why local SEO, in particular, is so important for your company’s success, growth, and future expansion!
What Actually Is SEO?
SEO stands for “search engine optimisation”. But what does this actually mean? Well, nowadays, when we’re looking to buy a product, the majority of us will go online. As a business owner, you’ll know that the lower operating costs associated with selling online mean that you can offer customers your goods or services at a lower price and they can also shop with you around the clock. But when they’re buying online, they don’t tend to know exactly who to go to in order to find what they’re looking for. So, they’ll use search engines. They’ll type a few keywords into the search bar and opt for one of the first choices that comes up. When’s the last time you searched beyond the first page of search engine results when shopping online? Probably a very long time ago. This is why it’s essential that your business ranks as highly as possible. The higher to the top of results you are, the more traffic will head to your page and the more likely customers will be to shop with you instead of a competitor. You’re grabbing their attention first! If you’re ever in doubt as to the importance of search engines for your business, always bear in mind that around 1.7 billion people make use of Google and other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo. Looking into SEO is a wise investment?!
The Importance of Local SEO
SEO comes in extremely important when running a local business. If you’re offering goods or services in a set area, you’re going to want to make sure that people from that area can find you. When consumers use google or another search engine, the search engine can generally tell where they are and will offer services or goods nearby to them higher up in the search result rankings. So you need to make sure that the search engine knows the areas you’re operating in too! These are all crucial considerations with your website design. So who do you choose for your website? Wix, Squarespace, well how about CurrantWeb? In fact our pay monthly website solution is the perfect alternative to those website builders. Read our Wix Alternatives & Squarespace Alternatives blogs for more information why.
How to Rank Highly
There are so many different ways you can rank highly for local SEO. The first and perhaps most effective is to outsource this work to competent SEO specialists. This can be a difficult area to get to grips with and they’ll be thoroughly versed on the topic and have insider insight into how to rank your page as highly as possible. You can also do a little further research into local SEO and how to use keywords in your online content too!
Local SEO really is essential for your small business. If you want to experience success, this is definitely a subject area you should be focusing on!