Small business SEO practices have become rather big. They are not to be taken lightly. As the competition has increased, small and mid-sized businesses are gearing up to compete with larger enterprises and the one thing that is making it possible for them is easy availability of small business SEO services. Some aspects of digital marketing and promotion that the leading Chicago SEO Experts would advise you to focus on are as follows:
Optimizing Google My Business
If you own a small business, Google My Business should be your focal point. You can easily update it and create a bigger impact of your brand on your target market. The biggest advantage of it is that it is absolutely free! Begin by claiming and verifying your Google My Business listing. You need to fill out as many fields as possible for the maximum impact. Also include photos and videos to enhance your business listing. Whenever you are about to select a category, do it wisely because it is going to help you target your intended consumer base. If you want to make the most of Google My Business, you should invest in creating questions and answers for your business. Whenever there is a question of local search results there is a section which displays questions asked by local people and their respective answers as well. It is your responsibility and the right approach to stay on top of these questions whenever they are put forth by your users. Creating your own questions and writing down the most appropriate answers that solve the pain points of your potential audience is the right approach.
Discover What Your Competitors Are Doing
Remember, there is a huge difference between your offline competitors and online competitors. For the purpose of search engine optimization, you are mostly concerned with the websites and online businesses that are competing directly with you in the race to grasp the first 5 to 10 positions in the Google search engine results. The targeted keywords will be common and this is why the competition here is going to be fierce.
Whenever you are doing a comparative analysis, you can use several tools to find out the following:
• What keywords and phrases are your competitors’ sites ranking for?
• How many pages have your competitors indexed?
• What is the structure of their website and how does it compare to your own?
•Assess the quality of their backlink profile
Another important aspect when comparing what your competitors have done and what you need to do in order to beat them at their own game, is assessment of page speed. This is a very important factor that Google's ranking algorithm is always going to consider. Running their landing pages through useful and efficient page speed tools is an approach you should always think it.
Try to find out whether their pages are running slow or not. Also, look for whether their keyword list lacks any keywords that you can probably target in the future. The tools that you can use here are SEMrush, SpyFu and Majestic.
Managing Your Local Business Listings Like A Pro
You also need to control the accuracy of your local business listings information. Make sure that the data you update is consistent. There are data aggregators such as Neustar, Localeze and Factual that share information about local businesses. They include your names, address and also frequently contacted phone numbers (NAP). Make sure that all this information is consistent and accurate. Any online mentions of any business can help improve its local presence among its users. Find a useful and affordable service that can be used to make you more visible in local directories and citations and effectively distribute your personal information to your users. The tools that you can use include Yext, BrightLocal and WhiteSpark. The leading SEO Chicago consultants always emphasize on making the most of every SEO tool available to small businesses if they really want to make it big. If you do not do it right there is no point in doing it at all.
