Getting Visitors to Your Local Business Website

It’s important for a local business website to look great and load quickly. It’s also important for this type of site to be filled with quality content that will hold visitors’ attention. However, none of those factors are going to matter much if a site is the equivalent of an online ghost town. Given how much competition there is among local and all other businesses online, it’s no longer enough to simply have a great website. Instead, businesses need to have a clear strategy for driving visitors to their website. Since this is something businesses across a wide range of industries struggle with, we want to share some advice on what actually works for getting visitors to your local business website in 2017:

1. Tag Optimization

If you’ve done any research into search engine optimization services, you may have read that meta tags are no longer important. While there’s some truth to that statement, it actually overlooks something quite significant. Although Google doesn’t use the meta keyword tag in its ranking, both the title and description tags are used to determine what’s displayed when a business website shows up in search results. So being strategic about what you write in both of these tags can have an impact on your site’s ranking, as well as getting searchers to click your result instead of any others on the page.

2. Quality Citations

Citations are the term used to refer to links from directories. You’ll want to ensure you have citations from large directories like Yelp, as well as smaller directories that specialize in your industry. The citations you’ll want to claim and optimize include Google My Business, which is the current system that Google uses for the data it shows in the three-pack of results at the top of many local search pages. It’s also important for all of your citations to be correct and consistent across directories.

3. Online Reviews

Not only are online reviews another factor that Google takes into account, but what’s written about your business across the Internet can either drive meaningful amounts of visitors or prevent people from even considering your business. There are a variety of different ways to increase the number of online reviews your business gets without breaking any guidelines. You can also use the reviews you receive to enhance initiatives like landing pages and ultimately improve the effectiveness of things like PPC advertising services.

While implementing any or all of what we covered above will benefit your business, completing these tasks in-house can be a challenge. If you want to work with experienced providers of local SEO services who have a track record of success, the Web Strategy Plus team can help craft and implement a strategy that’s tailored to the specific needs of your business.

The Best SEO Techniques for 2017

One of the reasons that search engine optimization is so challenging is it's a field that's always changing. In many cases, techniques that worked well just a year ago are no longer effective. There are two reasons this may happen. The first is when people rely on techniques that fall into either a gray or black area with Google's guidelines. If enough people start using this type of technique, Google will take action against them. Since that action can mean losing all search engine traffic, Web Strategy Plus always recommends sticking to SEO techniques that fall within Google's guidelines.

The other reason a technique that used to work well may no longer be effective is it gets used by too many sites. Even if the technique isn't breaking any guidelines, search engine optimization strategies that become very common aren't going to be enough to move the needle for a website in a meaningful way. So if you're considering enlisting professional search engine optimization services, it's important to choose a digital marketing agency that understands Google's guidelines but is also always looking for which technique within that area will provide a meaningful edge.

To help highlight some of the types of practices that can get your website to the top of Google for keyword phrases that your potential customers are using, we want to highlight four of the best SEO techniques for the upcoming year:

1. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

As more people use mobile devices to get online, Google has continued to increase the amount of emphasis it places on speed. One way to increase how fast your website loads on mobile is to integrate Google's AMP technology into your website. By utilizing AMP, you can optimize your site to load faster, which in turn will appeal to Google's ranking algorithm.

2. Local SEO

Part of Google's focus on delivering the most relevant results possible is providing local options whenever it makes sense. Ensuring your website is fully optimized for local search results can open up new possibilities that you may not have even realized were available. That's why the right local SEO services can be so valuable.

3. Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are a special block that Google often displays when users type in a question. Because this is the very first thing that Google displays for relevant queries, creating a strategy for featured snippets and then implementing this strategy into all your content creation efforts can yield significant results.

4. Video SEO

While video was huge during 2016 and only stands to become an even bigger driver of online activity in 2017, very few businesses are utilizing this medium as part of their SEO efforts. By not only creating interesting videos on a regular basis, but also optimizing them for search prior to publishing, you can get your business in front of viewers who are eager to consume online video.

If you want to ensure that you're taking advantage of all the right SEO techniques for your business this year, be sure to contact Web Strategy Plus for a free consultation.