Want More Local Customers? Enhance Your Local SEO Performance

Pro tip: Don’t forget to add your logo, business description, business categories that describe what your business does, as well as the services that you offer and plenty of images to show off your business premises in your Google My Business listing. The more you add, the more Google will love you.

Google My Business is a great way to encourage your customers to review your services online. Try to respond sincerely to any customer reviews you get – it’ll help boost your presence online significantly.

2. Encourage Reviews Online

Getting your loyal customers to write reviews for your business isn’t just something that will increase your local SEO rankings, it will also encourage more local buyers to come to you for their needs.

Here are some useful tips to help you encourage your customers to leave a review:

• Ask for a review in-person after you’ve finished their service or they’ve completed their purchase.
• Send a post-purchase email or text, asking if the customer would write a review. You can also try adding an incentive, like a percentage off their next service/purchase.
• Make sure that the customers you’re asking are happy with your services and you’re not approaching a dissatisfied customer. If you do get a neutral or negative review (hey, it happens to the best of us), the best thing you can do is respond in a positive, professional manner.
• Respond to ALL existing reviews on your website, Google My Business profile or social media accounts in a professional way. Thank anybody who gives you a review and address any complaints – try to turn an unhappy customer into a happy one.

Reviews are incredibly powerful in the decision making process when it comes to competing against local competitors. In this example, we searched for “Auto performance shops near Indianapolis” – the current top three listings that show up all seem pretty similar, so what’s the differentiator that makes the customer choose one over the other two? The multiple 4-5 star reviews! Even though Stage 1 Tuning is listed third they may get more customer visits to their site due to the larger number of reviews compared to the top two in this search.

Here’s some key automotive review data from the BrightLocal Google Reviews Study, 2018.

• 88% of automotive businesses have Google reviews
• Automotive businesses have an average of 27 Google reviews
• On average, automotive businesses have 4.4 stars

*These findings are based on 1,866 automotive businesses found using 97 related keywords.

PRO TIP: There are a number of reasonably priced automated solutions available that can make it easier to ask your customer for reviews, as well as make it easier for your clients to give reviews.

3. Optimize Your Website For Mobile Devices

As things shift to mobile the number of people that search for things on a desktop or laptop nowadays is decreasing. In fact, 2018 saw 52.2% of all website traffic worldwide generated through mobile phones, up from 50.3 percent from the previous year (Statista, 2019).

If your customers want to look something up, they’ll just take out their phone and do a quick search – especially if they’re on the road and looking for your location. This is why it’s so very important to have your website built and optimized for phones and tablets – you want to reach as many people in your local area as possible and having a mobile-ready website is one of the first steps.

How do you do this?

• If you’re not sure on your site’s mobile-readiness, first test it. An easy way to tell is to view it on a smartphone and if you need to zoom in to read any text, then it’s probably not mobile-ready.
• Make sure your website loads in under three seconds.
• Use mobile friendly fonts that are easy to read.
• Use a combination of text, images and video to convey important information. No one likes having to read through a novel just to get to someone’s list of products and services!
• Test and if needed, re-design your pop ups to work properly on a mobile phone – there’s nothing more frustrating than a pop up you can’t click out of.
• Make sure your phone number is easy to find and click to call is enabled (which means people can click on your phone number and their phone will call you automatically)
• Be sure to have a map or your full location address on your site so people can find your location once they’ve found you in search

PRO TIP: Always be thinking about your target audience and how they may be using your site. As time goes by more people from all age groups move to smartphones and tablets and live on their mobile devices, if your site does not load fast and work well on their devices they will move on…