SEO for Local Business

Performing SEO for your local business will increase your visibility in your service area. This helps your business reach out to customers who live in your local service area. To perform local SEO, you need to follow the below strategies.

1. Create/Optimise your google my business account.

2. Create/Optimise your local business website for local search queries.

3. Create multilingual content to serve your local customers.

Create/Optimise your Google My Business account (Superfast)

Creating a Google My Business account is a great move for your local business to gain visibility. Once you enter all the required details, your local business could start to appear in your locality when customers search for it.

Now, let’s know how to create a Google My Business account for your local business in Chennai.

1. Visit Create Google My Business account page to create my business account for your business.

This is how you business could appear when your custoemers search for you business online.

2. Type your local business name to find your business from the existing Google businesses. You can also add your business to Google.

First step in creating a GMB account.

3. Enter your local business name and choose the category from the existing list. If your business category is not listed, you can add it at a later stage.

Second step in creating GMB account

4. Choose YES if your local business has a physical location and NO if it's not. If chosen yes you need to enter the exact address of your local business including (Country/Region, Street address, Town/City, Pincode, and State).

Chossing your local business location

5. While verifying your Google My Business account, a postcard with a 5-digit verification code could be sent to this address. Carefully place the marker at the exact location of your business.

Enter the business contact number and website

6. In the next steps, you will be asked about your delivery of products/ or services, your business number, website (optional) to verify your identity.

Select the category that is relevant to your local business

7. As mentioned in step 3, you can choose or create a custom business category.

Give a description about your local business

8. Then you have to add the working hours of your local business, messaging option to let your customers contact you, and a description of your local business. Make your business description highly attractive as most local customers who view your profile will also read your business description.

Upload images relevant to your business, make sure they are unique and helpful.

9. Add photos of your brand, business, and product as most local customers will be interested to know more about your business visually.

The admin panel for your Google my business account

10. Once you follow all the above steps you will be directed to your google my business page. Here you will be able to edit and share content about your local business with your local customers.

Search result page with your business

This is where your business appears when people search for your business or the products you offer.

Create/Optimise your business website for local search queries

Owning a website opens great opportunities for your local business, like getting organic leads, improving brand visibility, nurturing the in-market and affinity audience in favor of your business, etc.

Once you create a website with Wix, you can start writing blogs to deliver content to your local customers. A blog is the best channel for content marketing, which is a proven way to market your product or service.

You can nurture your existing customers while also listing for local search queries with content marketing. For example, below is a list of search queries that were performed by people residing in Chennai.

Google search terms with monthly search volume

When you create a blog, you can focus on a particular search query and create content to match the searcher's intent.

Now let's take one query (lunch places near me) and create a content structure for it. (You can get queries across all businesses and industries “lunch places near me” is just an example)

If you need to satisfy someone who searches for lunch places near me, you should have detailed information about restaurants and pushcarts in Chennai.

These details include the exact location of the restaurants or the pushcarts, the food items available, their prices, open hours, and reviews about the place and its food quality.

You can create a content listing for “Top 10 lunch places near me” to target local customers who search for lunch places in Chennai. This in turn attracts customers from Chennai to your local business.

It’s actually another deep topic to discuss, which consists of on-page, off-page optimization, and technical SEO.

Create multilingual content to serve your local customers.

Having a multilingual site is the easiest way to gain the maximum results from your content and local business websites. Creating great content is hard, but translating that into another language is not that hard.

Most of the local customers speak the local language and notably the competition for content with the local language is low.

This gives you a great advantage over the local area as you serve the content in your customer's mother tongue.

Now let's see an example of this… I will take the search query “Chutney recipes in Tamil” - a similar search query so that you don't miss it. (This search query is just an example, you can get such queries across all businesses)

This is how you use Google keyword planner

Create good content for “Chutney recipes in Tamil” with all the required details like the ingredients, cooking procedure, etc., Start to serve the local community with content in their language.

They will be attracted to your business and in turn, get converted to your local business.

Conclusion

We Have now got a basic idea about how local SEO helps your local business. But this is not enough if your want to grow your business superfast.

Under Google my business you have: Optimised products listed, Offer announcements, Review collecting, optimizing the visual experience, and much more.

Website on the other hand has tons and tons of strategies to perform. An evergreen example is Amazon which started with a website and now is one of the world's most valued companies.