Local businesses in the United States and around the world are under threat. In the past few years, most services that were being provided by local businesses have been cannibalized by Silicon Valley startups. For example, in the past, local furniture stores used to do well because local residents would buy products from them. Today, this has changed as most shoppers prefer online furniture companies like Wayfair. The same is true for other retail companies that have been disrupted by companies like Amazon. Further, local service providers have been disrupted by companies like Taskrabbit and Angie’s List. In this article, we will look at the best SEO strategies for your local business.

Focus on Local Keywords

A good strategy to ensure that your website is optimized for local search is to focus on keywords with the name of your location. For example, if you run a hair salon, we recommend that you optimize for hair salon in your location. As such, if your salon is located in San Jose, optimize your website for a keyword like best hair salon San Jose. This keyword will do better than a keyword like best hair salon. The reason for this is that the latter keyword is very broad because of the vast number of salon businesses. Most of these companies have more SEO budget than you. Therefore, focus on local keywords. As the leading SEO San Jose company, SoftwareCy we also recommend that your SEO provider take a lot of time doing keyword research.

Create Videos

Google owns YouTube, which is the most popular video platforms in the world. What many people don’t realize is that YouTube is also one of the biggest search engine providers in the world. These days, when you do a Google search, you will find some video results. As such, if your videos are optimized for the search engines, it will help you have more users. We recommend that you set part of your budget to creating well-optimized YouTube videos. The same is true with other digital products like images and infographics.

Invest in Quality Links

The term website is made up of two words: web and site. A web is made up of many interconnected features. The same is true with website optimization. Your website will have a better ranking if many other websites are linking to it. Therefore, we recommend that you invest in having links from many quality websites. A good way to do this is to create backlinks from quality websites. You can do this by getting in touch with the website administrators to have them accept a post for you. Most administrators will accept this for a fee. You can also create guest posts.

Google My Business

Another thing that will help improve your website ranking is Google My Business. This is a feature that Google introduced a while back. The service displays several important details when people conduct searches. For example, if you search for a barber shop in San Jose, you will see locations, address, phone numbers, and whether a barber shop is open or not. Therefore, we recommend that you implement this feature.

Doing these simple things will help you achieve a better ranking on your website. This will in turn lead to more sales, lower customer acquisition cost, a better brand, and a better exposure for your website.