6 Common Local SEO Mistakes & How You Can Avoid Them
Local SEO is often essential to boost the online visibility of local brands, especially small businesses. But if you’ve never tried your hand at SEO or you’re simply not knowledgeable about optimizing a business online, you could be missing out on a wealth of opportunities to rank higher on Google and gain more customers. Even worse, you might be making mistakes that could hurt your business in both the short and long term.
So, what exactly are those mistakes and how can you fix them? Let’s dive right in and find out!
Using Broad keywords
It’s understandable to want to rank for easy keywords, but there are many whales that exist within the world of SEO, and it’s rather easy for them to swallow up smaller businesses that try to tread on their keywords. However, there’s still hope to be found for the smaller fish out there.
The key is to go for localized, more specific keywords. So, for example, instead of targeting “tutoring” and getting beaten out by every established tutoring brand, try “math tutor in Tuscon” or “UCLA chemistry tutor”. Localized keywords like these will be lower traffic because they would only apply to so many businesses, giving your business a much better shot at ranking for them.
A Lack of Customer Reviews
The primary way customers discover the quality of your service or product is through reviews, but if your reviews aren’t readily available on popular platforms, such as Yelp or Google, you could be turning off potential customers.
To fix this, you’ll want to be more on top of encouraging your existing customers to review you. You can do this with physical review cards that a customer can fill out once the service is completed, but you can also request reviews digitally through email or even your social media.
Also, look into other directory sites that are in your industry. For example, for solar companies, there is a site called solarreviews.com which serves as not only a hub for solar news but also for reviewing companies.
Minimal Directory Profiles--or None at All
Customers view directory profiles similarly to reviews—they establish credibility for your business, showing that your company is legitimate enough to have an official online presence that is separate from your website or social media. But having official profiles on sites like Yelp or Google My Business also makes it easier for potential customers to actually find your business.
If you search “restaurants near me” on Google, you’ll see a map pop up with little red icons displaying the locations of multiple restaurants within your general vicinity. You’ll also notice that these restaurants are listed below the map with their operating hours, ratings, dining options, and a few other details. You can just imagine the amount of visibility these restaurants get every single day on the search page, and ranking in this manner is only possible by having a Google My Business profile.
Luckily, setting up a Google My Business account is fairly easy and 100% free, so if you don’t have one, start here.
Not Optimizing Your Website for Mobile
Have you ever attempted to read through a website on your phone, only to have some important piece of text get abruptly cut off by the screen? Or been forced to zoom in on a photo or paragraph because the image and words were simply too small to view on mobile?
68% of all website visits now come from mobile devices, which is a large figure, but it also makes sense—people are constantly on the go and our phones, which are essentially mini computers, provide a more accessible and faster way of looking up information. That’s why it’s imperative that your website is optimized for mobile as well as desktop.
Responsive design will not only prevent frustration for the potential customers visiting your site, but a more positive user experience can also provide a boost in your rankings.
Having a Poor Quality Website
While we’re on the note of the importance of responsive design, you’ll want to also be mindful that your website doesn’t look like it’s stuck in 2003. This happens with the use of hard-to-read fonts, bad-quality pictures, and awkward formatting. But you can avoid these issues by implementing some simple tips:
Utilize header tags for the most crucial information on your site to catch your visitors attention and to make it easier for Google to know what your site is about.
Break up dense paragraphs into smaller sections and use web-friendly fonts that are easy to read.
Use enticing, vivid pictures that show your brand off at its best.
On that last note, make sure that each of your images has alt-text. This is a short and sweet caption that goes right below a picture and all major website-providers should have the option to add in this text. The purpose is to ensure that visitors have a vague idea of what your images are meant to look like in case they don’t load, and alt-text will also help search engine crawlers correctly index the photo.
Keyword Stuffing
Back in the old days of SEO, companies could get away with listing a bunch of keywords nonsensically somewhere on their websites and gaining traffic, but this wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
For one, it created a bad user experience. Someone trying to buy some decorative pillows on a site would be understandably thrown off by seeing “decorative pillows best outdoor pillows red pillows” in the description. Google realized this and in the last decade, the search engine’s algorithm has gotten quite clever at telling when keyword stuffing is taking place.
That’s why it’s important to make any copy or text on your website as natural sounding as possible. Yes, you want to get your keywords in, but when it comes to website content, they don’t always have to be in a specific order. You would do better for your SEO and the experience of your readers to explain your brand or service in a way that flows and makes sense rather than awkwardly fluff up sentences with keywords.
While implementing better SEO practices can be difficult, having an understanding of the potential mistakes you could be making and knowing how to fix them is a great place to start. With the tips in this guide, you’ll be on track to improve your Google rankings and attract more hungry customers to your business in no time.
