Investing any effort, time, or money into your business surely pays off. As online searches have become extremely important in spreading awareness about small businesses, it is worthy to pay attention to your Google rankings. There are many ways you can achieve more on Google. However, many of these methods cost money and are not suitable for all businesses. If you’re running a small business, you’re in the right place. You will be interested to know that there are cheap pays to make your local business rank better on Google and attract more customers. Let’s go through the tips and tricks you should know as a local business owner.
Complete the contact info and keep it updated
What helps a potential customer to find your business faster and easier, is the complete contact info. Make sure to fill in all the necessary contact information such as an address, phone number, but also the category of your business and a short description. In case you’ve already done this a long time ago, check if that info needs an update. Keeping this up-to-date will increase the credibility of your business and therefore attract more customers.
Working hours should be accurate
There’s nothing more frustrating for a customer to try to visit a local business only to find out that it’s not working. If a customer makes a mistake like this due to inaccurate working hours on your website or Google, the chances are they are not coming back. So, to avoid confusion and angry customers, make sure you always update your working hours, especially if they change during weekends and holidays, or any special occasions. The customers will surely appreciate that, as they are trusting your online information.
Visual description – add photos to your Business Profile
Another free way to ensure your local business rank better on Google is by adding photos and videos to the Business Profile. This will help the potential customer trust your descriptions and visit you as soon as possible. Photos are visual support to your online image and are equally important as other contact information.
Another important factor is the quality of your online photos. The quality should be as high as possible, and pictures should be accurate and in accordance with your descriptions. Even though paying a professional photographer would be the best option, there are other cheaper ways to take photos of your products and business. Fortunately, smartphones have amazing cameras nowadays, and you can find some useful tutorials online on how to make good product photos with almost no money.
Become mobile-friendly
Smartphones have taken over in the last couple of years. From calling a cab, shopping to food deliveries, most of the online purchases happen via mobile phones. For that reason, you need to make your website closer to your potential customers – and this means going mobile-friendly. Adapting your website this way will ensure a positive user experience and therefore make them come back when they need the same service or product, which means you can make your local business get a better ranking on Google with AZ Citation Services.
Do some speed optimization
When talking about a positive user experience, another cheap way to make your website more attractive for users and Google is to optimize its speed. If a website is working smoothly and users can switch from page to page easily and quickly – they will surely come back again. The acceptable load speed is 3 seconds or less. Anything more than that can drive away potential shoppers.
There are several ways to speed up your website:
- add browser cashing to store files locally on users’ devices, so the pages open much faster next time they visit;
- optimize images – photos on your website should be of high-quality, but if they are too big in size they can slow down your website. Be sure to resize them before the upload.
- optimize the code to minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML and improve your site’s speed;
- host media files on one of the content delivery networks;
- enable compression for large, bulky pages so they are easier to download;
Remember, even one second matters and can result in customer satisfaction and a positive experience. And that one second or two can make your local business rank better on Google.
Take a look at your keywords
Keywords are probably one of the main factors of good or bad Google ranking. That’s why you need to be very careful when picking them, and also change them if the style of your business, trends or other factors change and evolve. If you feel that your current keywords are not doing well – check your competition. It’s good to peek at your competitor’s content and check if their keywords are doing better than yours. Use these phrases and adapt them to your business.
You can even use some amazing tools to help you with keyword research. Furthermore, if your website is mobile-friendly, make sure you distinguish desktop and mobile keywords since these can be pretty different. When using mobile phones, users tend to type shorter phrases and use more local, specific searches. These include the name of the city or neighborhood or phrases like ‘near me’.
Conclusion – are there cheap ways to make a local business rank better on Google?
As you could see in the article above, these methods are mostly free. They surely require your time and effort – but these will certainly pay off very soon. Improving the online image of your local business shows that you care about your customers. This proves that not only your products or services are good, but you also want to present them in the best light possible. Customers will recognize that and become a returning shopper.
