Marketing the local marketing of your business has come a long way since the days of the yellow pages.
Back then, you’d simply pull out the heavy yellow book and look up “electrician,” then choose one whose ad instilled the most trust in you.
Nowadays, people no longer consider the design of an ad in choosing a local company. Instead, they look at their online reviews and perform internet searches to see what kind of an experience other people have had.
If you’re a New Bern business and are looking to increase local traffic, you should focus your efforts on local SEO. Read on to learn about what you can do to optimize your local SEO rankings and drive more traffic to your business.
What is Local SEO?
In a nutshell, local SEO is the optimization of both your website and Google My Business profile. It can allow your company business profile to rank high in the local search results in Google, and most importantly, increase the chances of landing a new customer or client.
Google My Business
If you haven’t already done so, head on over to Google My Business and claim your free profile. Once there, fill out your business name, address, and phone number. Then, take the time to carefully fill out the rest of the information, such as company description, COVID-19 policies, hours of operation, and so on.
It’s vital that you fill out your company info as accurately as possible. Otherwise, if someone comes to your Google My Business page from the internet, there’s a chance they won’t be able to contact you due to your phone number being one digit off or any number of other errors.
You should also include pictures and videos (if possible), as there is a section on your profile where you can upload them.
This is the first step to improving your rankings in the local search results. Google looks with favor upon businesses who have completely filled out their profile—and more importantly—it can help people find and contact your business.
Your Website
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You should also optimize your website for on-site SEO. This includes the removal of dead (404) hyperlinks and the inclusion of high-quality content. A valid SSL certificate is also important as it’s a signal to Google that your business has a legitimate presence on the web.
The most important aspect of your on-site SEO is your Schema, which are tags you can add to the code of your website that will help Google and other search engines read, understand, and represent your site in the search results. A great way to check to see if your Schema is to head on over to the Structured Data Testing Tool from Google.
Enter in your website URL, and in a minute or two, Google will come back and tell you if your Schema code is valid. If it shows any errors, you have one of two options:
- Attempt to fix it yourself.
- Hire a professional to do it for you.
Unless you’re handy with website coding, this is one of those things that’s best left to the professionals.
Testimonials and Reviews
As we stated in the intro to this blog post, many people nowadays look at a company’s online reviews before deciding to make a purchase. If you don’t have many reviews, this is one of the more important aspects of local SEO that you should work on.
A great way to encourage your customers or clients to leave reviews is to add a small snippet of code to your website that will result in a button placed on the checkout or other internal pages. The text of the button will ask people to head on over to your Google profile and leave an honest review.
You can find the code in your Google My Business profile. All you need to do from there is just copy and paste it into your website's code. Google provides step-by-step instructions on where to find the code and how to implement it.
Marketing Help in New Bern
Optimizing your company website for local SEO offers many benefits, such as a chance to drive increased traffic and rank higher in the search results. Depending on how optimized your site and Google My Business profile currently are, it may take you a few hours to a week or two to get things dialed in.
At AlphaGraphics of New Bern, we specialize in both printing and marketing services. If you have any questions about improving your local SEO organic search engine rankings, give us a call. To learn more about how AlphaGraphics of New Bern can produce and design your next project, you may
email us,
request a quote, or call us at
(252) 633-3199.