In the digital age, the first touchpoint a potential new customer has with your local hair salon, restaurant, retail store, or other brick-and-mortar business is most likely your website.
Local SEO (search engine optimization) is crucial for making sure your website shows up when those nearby customers search for businesses like yours on Google, Bing, and other search engines.
With more than half of consumers visiting a local business website before stepping foot in the actual store, having an SEO-optimized site can directly translate to more phone calls, contact form submissions, and walk-ins from website visitors.
For businesses that rely on neighborhood traffic like digital marketing for hair salons focused on providing excellent digital marketing services, failing to tap into local SEO means leaving sales on the table.
Actionable Local SEO Tactics to Boost Your Website Traffic
Follow these 15 tips to optimize your local business website for search engine and customer relevance:
Focus on Quality and Credibility
- Ensure your website loads quickly. According to Google research, 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Use image compression, browser caching, and other optimizations to accelerate load times.
- Make sure your website works well on mobile. As much as 60% of local searches happen on smartphones. Use a mobile-friendly responsive design.
- Publish regular blog content. Search engines favor frequently updated sites with new content. Post at least one new blog article per week to demonstrate expertise in your field. For a hair salon, this could cover topics like hair care tips, new service offerings, staff highlights, or community events.
- Ensure high-quality website copy. Well-written content with good grammar and spelling builds credibility. Lean on your marketing agency partners for copywriting services if needed.
Optimize for Local Customers
- Prominently display your business name, address and phone number in the header or footer of every page. This reassures searchers that you are a local business able to serve their needs.
- Make sure your business is accurately listed on directory sites like Google My Business, Facebook Places, and customer review platforms like Yelp. Claim and update your listings with current information. Encourage customer reviews on these sites.
- Clearly showcase the specific services you provide with details on pricing, options, and value. Include informative FAQs to address customer questions before they ask. For a hair salon, this might encompass haircut styles, coloring services, formal updo options, and more.
- Feature images depicting your actual business locale on your website. This gives customers visual confirmation they’ve found the right neighborhood spot.
- Link to third-party review sites like Yelp and Facebook to reassure visitors your business is established and trusted within the community. Highlight positive press coverage as well.
Craft Relevant Page Content
- Research the specific terms and phrases customers use when searching for local businesses like yours. Brainstorm a list of 20+ relevant long-tail keywords and naturally integrate these into your site content. Local SEO tools like Moz and Semrush can uncover valuable keyword opportunities.
- Include your city name and localized geographical terms like “near me”, “in my area”, or your neighborhood name across your site content. Optimizing for searchers wanting to find businesses physically close to them is vital for local SEO.
- Create dedicated pages showcasing your service area. List the zip codes, neighborhoods, suburbs, and metro regions you serve.
- Highlight what makes you special compared to big national competitors. Play up your convenient location, personable service, community roots, competitive prices, years of experience etc. Local customers value neighborhood businesses that provide specialized expertise and individualized care tailored to their needs.
Get Technical with On-Page SEO
- Properly optimize page titles and meta descriptions. These snippets visible in search results greatly impact click-through rates. Include your business name, location, and a descriptive overview of page content.
- Implement schema markup on your contact page, business hours block, and reviews section. This structured data makes vital information like address and phone number crawlable. Google recommends markup for improving local search visibility.
By focusing both on optimal technical SEO practices as well as creating content tailored to local customers and relevant search queries, your website will attract more high-intent website visitors ready to engage your business. Measure success with goals tracking for phone call and contact form conversions.
