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How can small businesses garner more local online traffic?

Jay

Getting physical traffic to your business is only half the battle. For our clients, receiving clicks to their website is how they ultimately find success. By following these four steps, you’ll find an increase in online traffic, no matter how small your business is.

  1. The Map Listing

The ultimate goal is having your business listed at the top of the map listings. To do this, you must look at two big factors: reviews and links. Actively ask your customers to review you. Don’t trick them or pay them to do so, just simply ask if they wouldn’t mind reviewing you after they visit your business.
But keep in mind that where they post makes a difference. Be sure your customers are only reviewing you on sites they are already comfortable using. For example, if your customer creates a Yelp account for the sole purpose of leaving you a review, their review will be deemed pointless, but if they are already active on Yelp, the review will hold a lot of traction.
Other sites your customers can post reviews on are Google, Facebook, Yellow Pages or other industry-specific directories. An example of this is avvo.com, a lawyer-specific directory, or trip advisor for hotels.
Once reviews have been made, it’s your job to interact with those reviews: respond to them all, whether they are positive or negative. Engaging with these reviews will help your Google rankings and your map listing.

Map Listing

In this example, when searching for “funeral services Boca Raton,” The Gardens of Boca Raton comes up first in the map listing. This is a proven success of their reviews and links.


 

  1. Links

Links are a great way to gain clicks and engagement on your website. But there are good and bad ways to incorporate links. Always make sure your links are relevant and if possible, local. If you have a business in Boca Raton, Florida, a link to a service in California feels random. Plus, if you know the local companies, they can link back to you, garnering even more clicks and engagement.
Another way to get links is through the media. Try to get local pieces written about you, or have them quote you in an article. At the end, or within, the article, have that media source link back to you with an active link. This is an authoritative link coming back to your site and is very beneficial to your traffic levels.

  1. Proximity

This one isn’t anything you can change unless you are in the early stages of your business and have yet to find a permanent location. If you are in those early stages, consider your web traffic and map listing when choosing a final destination. Being close to the center of a town or city will help you when someone uses a place-specific search query for showing up in the map listings.
All things being equal, Google will use the 3 business to the center of town as opposed to the business located on the outskirts. We have seen many examples of business ranking in the top 3 for a keyword but not included in the organic map results.

  1. Schema

A schema is language you can put on the back end of your site. The language gets wrapped around text that doesn’t appear on the site when you view it, but will tell Google and other search engines explicitly what a piece of content is about. Incorporating schemas into your site is a great way to inform Google about your content, and it is a very basic thing to do if you have access to the back end of your site.

Local Business Schema

In this example, we are telling Google that this is a local business. He is an Attorney and his address at 415 S Olive Ave …


A good example of this is if you have “142 Martin Luther King Way” on your site, 99% of the time, it looks like an address. Telling Google explicitly that the piece of information is your business address and not a reference to Martin Luther King the person takes any ambiguity out of the equation.
You can also use schema to add reviews to your Search Engine Results Page listing or help Google understand what a video on your site is about.
To learn more about how you can grow online traffic for your business, contact the experts at Ten Golden Rules.