Are you trying to promote your small business in the local area with an existing website? Or are your considering whether you should build your own small business website? Either way, it is important that you have a rudimentary understanding of search engine optimization (SEO) principles and practices before embarking on promoting your small business website in the local area. Hence, we hope you find the following SEO checklist of 4 essential items for local small business websites for SEO helpful:

 

Item #1 – Build Your Own Small Business Website

Why would you do that you might ask? It seems to go against intuition as it will involve a lot of investment in time and skills to learn to build websites. That is what journeying small business owners have believed for many years, but is isn’t the case. Using a small business website builder you can build a website that is engineered to help you get traction online, and comes with strong support and resources (such as this article) that will give you direction to implement the simple periodic SEO processes detailed below).

 

Item #2 – Purchase a Domain Name

Once you have finished building your own small business website within Dazzly, you can browse to the Domains menu and register a domain name. Dazzly is a quality domain name provider and can assist you register the perfect domain name for your small business, whether it’s a .com, .org. or .co – we can assist you with this. A domain name is essential in indicating to search engines that you’re a reputable website (as well as signalling a basic level of organization and professionalism to local customers). In respect of local customers, you may wish to register the domain name that best represents your local area in their eyes, for most of north American this will simply be the .com TLD.

 

Item #3 – Create an Article your Local Customers will enjoy

Write with your local customers in mind. As a small business owner, you will be interacting with your customers on a personal level, and that means including basic terms such as “local small business accounting practice” naturally within these articles to ensure that the search term has some reference point to understand the physical location of your service (or where your service can be delivered). If you want to raise the chances of getting your small business some local visibility for your website within the short-medium term, then we’d advise writing several articles for a particular service and local area combination. Unless the online competition is particularly high, or your population (or demand) is generally low, this is generally a sure-fire strategy to getting some online traffic, traction and leads for your small business in the shortest amount of time.

 

Item #4 – Get a Google My Business Profile

As detailed in our longer SEO guide, we recommend that you create a google my business profile and complete the steps to verify your business address in-order to make it clear to Google and to local searchers of your physical office location or service area. Note that once you’ve created the profile, you’re also able to request reviews from your customers which is absolutely essential in reinforcing your location (via the customers who are reviewing your services). This is critical for getting local small business representation for your services.

The above four points are the most important things on our must-do SEO checklist for local small business websites, but we know there are more things you can consider such as creating linkbacks for your business website, getting published in local articles, social media posting, as well as reaching out to partner businesses and other small business associations to ask for links back to your website.

 

What is the most important item on the above SEO Checklist?

Item #1 – get a solid website that will be fundamentally geared towards getting your website content visible within local searches whilst simultaneously balancing the need to look visually professional and have engaging content for customers (new and prospective) as well as straight-forward point of contact for enquiries.

 

In conclusion, if you work through the above SEO Checklist For Local Small Business Websites then there is a high probability that in the medium-term, with hard work and effort, but without extra spend, you can get visibility and attract new customers from your local area for your small business. We hope you enjoyed reading this article and we look forward to providing updates and even more tips as we develop our SEO knowledge further and watch trends from our customer websites in 2022.