WordPress offers easy way to build websites. However, the common challenge for every business owner is to establish a strong web presence. Especially generating a local traffic is the most important for any small business owners. Search engines provides special options like click to call and adding business locations to make sure you can convert the traffic into sales. Hence optimizing your site for local search engine rankings is a key factor to success in your small business strategy.
Local Web Traffic for Small Business Owners
In this article, we will discuss various tips for getting more local traffic to WordPress site with an example. Let’s take a Google search query example “organic tea shop in new york”. Below is the search results in Google for this query. This will give you an idea of how to get local traffic from Google search results.
1. Add Business Location in Google My Profile
Make sure, the search results show your business location along with the phone number when a customer searches in Google. Most of the local customer prefers to call and order their items at their doorstep which gives you a great business opportunity by displaying your phone number in the search results. If you opt to advertise with Google Ad or Bing Ads then do not forget to add your business location in your ad and set the geo-targeting to your local area. This is one of the simple and easy way to get local traffic to website you own.
Learn how to add your business in Google My Business.
2. Make Sure Visibility of Map in Search Results
The impact is clearly visible for the search result with map and without map. The map not only provides the location of your business but also indicates other details like working hours and the visitor reviews about your business. Google collects these details from your website, business listings and reviews from popular websites. Therefore, when you have a good customers, request them to leave a review in Google My Business. It will help you to attract more customers from the search results page.
Though there are WordPress plugins available for collecting customer reviews, Google mostly show the reviews and location details from the local directories.
3. Go Social
Facebook Page is the third top in the search results which has a huge potential to attract more visitors to your Page. This gives immense opportunity for you to update the latest events and happenings about your business in the fan page so that the visitor will get noticed and contact you if they are interested. This is applicable for other social networks like Twitter, Pinterest, etc. Create a page or account in all social medias and connect them each other so that when you post in one network it can be seen in every other network.
There are plenty of social sharing plugins available for WordPress which you can make use to share the content.
4. Target Top Four Search Results
Note the top four search results, all are from different referral sites linking to the same business and the business owner’s site is not displayed in the top four. This is the power of quality backlinking which is more simple and easier for the local businesses. Make sure you have an online presence in all the popular local websites.
5. Go For Local Classifieds Websites
Advertising your business in local classifieds websites is a simple way of creating backlinks to your site as well as to attract customers. This will also help users to write a review about your business which will create a positive impact on new customers. Out of four top results there are two from the popular local classifieds sites.
- Find out the best classifieds site showing top in the search results in your local area and go through their terms and conditions before you opt for advertising with them.
- Once you decided to go ahead, select the category of your business carefully.
- Select one or two categories which are best matching your business.
- Adding your site under many categories distract the user’s review as well as downgrade your ranking in the search results.
6. Add Local SEO Details to Your WordPress Site
Among the five points listed above, you can create Facebook Page, list your site in local classifieds sites and add your business in Google. However, getting search visibility needs lot of technical stuff to include in your site so that Google pick up the details. Simply having a contact page is not sufficient for this purpose and you have to output the data in required schema.org format. Below are some of the basic details you need to get top rank in Google local search results:
- Your business address, store locator when you have a business running in multiple physical locations.
- Showing Google Maps location of your business
- Opening / closing hours and holidays
- Generating KML file and adding into your XML Sitemap
- Product review snippets from your store
The best option is to go for a premium plugin like Yoast Local SEO. This plugin will add required schema details in all your pages so that Google will display them nicely in search snippets. Combined with strong local SEO and good customer reviews can drive local traffic to your WordPress site.
7. Competitor Analysis
When you have heavy competition in local search result ranking, it is good idea to do competitor analysis. You can use tools like semrush to analyze traffic data of your competitors and understand their strengths. This will help you to improve your website performance and compete with them easily.
Conclusion
You can do certain things like social promotion, getting customer reviews and listing in local classified websites to drive local traffic to WordPress site. However, it is clearly evident that you need additional tools like plugin or third-party service to rank high in search engine results.
1 Comment
Leave your reply.