Anyone that owns a business with a website, or any kind of e-commerce platform has likely tried various strategies to improve their search engine optimisation.
You may not be a master of local SEO, but this practice is instrumental in the way you acquire traffic and grow your business.
Organic traffic acquired through SEO is the most valuable kind of traffic your business could have. These people are sales-qualified leads that are actively looking for products or services that you offer.
Hence, it’s critical that you apply the best local SEO practices to ensure that the traffic you receive is as relevant as possible.
Why is SEO important?
In order to be able to turn SEO practices into sales, it’s important to know how they connect and how to optimise your website based on the keywords relevant to your business.
It’s a process that will remain constantly developing, helping the search engines find your site and send the relevant traffic to your site.
This traffic will become your leads, and you’ll then convert those into your sales.
Ranking high in search results means that you’ll be able to attract enough traffic to make your business profitable.
And at the same time, potentially spend less on advertising over time!
This traffic needs to convert at a reasonable level to be sustainable, as sales or conversions are the driving force in what makes this a profitable practice.
SEO should be a fundamental part of your marketing strategy, and it could revolutionise your business to improve e-commerce sales, and sales and store visitors if you have a physical shop.
Currently, there are over 3.5 billion searches on Google every single day!
Many of those searches are people looking for products and services, your website’s offerings included.
Your potential prospects are split into four distinct groups:
- actively looking to buy
- sourcing information and comparing products
- aware that they need or want a particular product
- have no active desire for a product at all
It’s critical that you’re appealing to all of these groups to ensure your SEO strategy is successful.
To your advantage, most businesses only focus on the top 3% and miss out on all the remaining 97%!
The amount of time and investment you make with your SEO will in turn increase the level of relevant traffic your business will receive, and increase your chances of converting those visitors into paying customers.
SEO practices should govern a huge part of your site, whether it be an ‘about us’ page, your product descriptions, blogs, listings, integration of your social media, and much more.
It’s also important to look at whether your core customer base is localised or international, as that will affect your strategy massively.
We’re going to look at how you can affect your SEO locally within Singapore to give your business the boost it needs.
How can you increase sales with local SEO?
So many businesses are too quick to jump to paid advertising and are not concerned with SEO from the start.
Connecting your SEO to sales should be a priority when launching your business because as we saw with the iOS14 update, advertising platforms are not a stable source of traffic.
Google on the other hand is never going away, so even if paid advertising platforms take a dive, you have a fundamental customer base to rely on.
The main goal is to bring visitors from the search engines to your website and convert them to customers that purchase a product or service from you once, or on a regular basis.
We need to align the search engines with our products and services to ensure as many of the people who visit our sites convert as possible.
If your website is not optimised, you are taking on lots of irrelevant traffic, which will increase your bounce rate and hurt your SEO.
With regards to localised products and services, that entails ensuring that as much relevant information about your location as possible is reflected in your content, titles, and descriptions, as well as formulating key links with other localized domains, such as local directories, newspapers, forums, etc.
This will show Google that you are a local business that is very active with their local online presence, and in turn, you will rank higher with potential customers that are in your location.
Still not convinced that SEO is a valuable part of your sales process?
In 2020, e-commerce sales topped 4.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide.
Studies show that:
- over 25% make their purchase from the top result in the Google search result.
- 55% purchase from the top three results.
- and the overwhelming majority of consumers (around 81%) start their buying journey with online research.
Figures like that prove that SEO is an invaluable tool that all online businesses need to embrace.
It’s not just online orders that SEO is having an incredible impact on.
People also use search results to find local shops and services before proceeding to make purchases in person.
In 2021, 46% of all Google searches were people trying to find local information and 97% of users have looked for a local business at some point on their platform.
Increasing your sales through local SEO practices is a process that will never be completed.
You will need to constantly amend strategy, innovate and compete to keep yourself at the top of the search engine results pages, and there will always be someone waiting in the wings ready to take your spot away from you.
If you continually dedicate time and budget to these practices, your sales will naturally increase.
There is no absolute formula for SEO, but there are plenty of strategies available to suit all business types and budgets.
Try these 8 tips to grow your traffic and sales through local SEO within 90 days
1. Keyword strategy
Keyword strategy is the absolute cornerstone with regards to SEO as this is how a business shows the search engines what their website is about and what customer searches are relevant to your business.
You will need to identify keywords that are centerpieces of the business you are running but also mix those in with some location and brand-based terms that will reflect the fact that you are a local business, rather than an international brand.
This will allow you to reach a more localised audience and secure traffic from your local community.
It’s absolutely essential that the localised side of your keywording has been completed because the alternative is that you will receive lots of useless traffic.
When building your keyword list, look for niches that aren’t too oversubscribed, and check out your competitors to see what their strategy is, while being careful not to directly copy them or their content.
Let us show you how to do it.
2. High-quality content
Once you’ve decided upon your important keywords, it’s time to begin creating content on your website using those keywords to attract your audience.
It’s important that all content is high-quality and based on the words selected.
Search engines are intelligent enough to know when you are oversaturating your website with keywords and this will have the opposite effect.
Look to create blog posts, website copy, videos, guides, about pages, whatever you can think of to add value to your page, paying special attention to the localised nature of your business.
It’s really important that this is emphasised in your content so the search engines can show you to the people most likely to make purchases from your business.
It’s also incredibly important to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, so your local shoppers can easily find you when they are out of the home and surfing on their mobile devices.
3. On-page SEO
Your On-page SEO will then be integrated into your content and help search engines discover your website.
Study how to use your keywords in the best possible way, and ensure the content on your site is well structured and easy to consume.
This will make it easier for search engines to crawl your site for data and reflect it within their results.
We’d recommend optimising every page of your website and every piece of new content that you publish.
If you’re an e-commerce store, your descriptions need to be completely unique and written with your keywords and the search engines in mind, use clear words and language and pay special attention to the localised nature of your business.
If you only operate in a certain area, you can achieve this with phrases such as ‘Shipping within Singapore’, or if you’re in a district and want to get a very specific ‘Click and Collect in Telok Blangah’.
4. User-experience (UX)
While this piece of advice is not really relevant to local SEO, it’s still very important for you to consider.
Modern web users have very little patience (the average time someone will wait for a website to load in 2 seconds) and expect the gold standard when it comes to loading times and usability on the websites that they use.
That means you need to ensure you’re using a high-quality server provider, your content is compressed and your menus and navigation are easy-to-use.
Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights and find out how well your website performs.
Customers want to get to their end result as quickly as possible and poorly hosting or putting together websites leads to increased bounce rates.
A high bounce rate is very bad for your SEO because Google believes people visit your site, see it’s irrelevant to their needs and then immediately leave.
Want to check your current bounce rate?
- 1. Hop into your Google Analytics.
- 2. Adjust the timeframe to 6 months
- 3. Go under “Audiences -> Overview” and check your current bounce rate.
- 4. Compare your bounce rate
Make sure your bounce rate is not too high as It can lead to a really negative result for your business.
5. Product/Business Reviews
Now, this point is really huge for local SEO.
Search engines are increasingly looking at customer reviews left on their platforms to assess your credibility.
If your business has lots of positive reviews, that tells them that your business is exactly what your customer wants, and particularly locally, a mere few reviews can be the difference between you topping the listings or being on the second page.
You can also use this as an incredible tool to source more sales and traffic locally.
Increasingly, consumers are checking Google My Business reviews before shopping with businesses in person.
Having a good catalog of positive reviews for them to see instantly can be the swaying factor between them choosing you, or a competing business.
Customers need to trust that you’re offering a quality product or service based on what they can find online.
You can also consider review platforms and send out requests to customers by email if you’d like to boost your numbers in this area.
6. More Local SEO
As we’ve discussed above, local searches are a cornerstone to your business and will in turn increase your foot traffic if you have customer-facing premises.
Actively seek out opportunities to use local SEO to pop up in searches for your city or local area.
Embrace local keywords to increase the traffic for your business and always make sure your website is mobile-friendly to help your local user base.
Check if your website is mobile-friendly with the Google Mobile-Friendly Test.
7. Add a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page
Another opportunity to beef up your SEO is to add FAQs to your website.
Think about the questions that you are most commonly asked by your customers and identify the issues your potential clients might have with your products or services.
Creating a concise glossary of responses to ease customer’s concerns could be the difference between a sale and no sale.
We can also input lots of local SEO in this section, including the area you cover, deliveries for certain areas, click and collect information, and much more.
An invaluable asset for your local strategy.
8. When you’re up and running
Once you have traffic to a level that you’re happy with and your visitors are reassured that they are dealing with a secure and reliable local business, make sure that your customer journey is smooth for quick sales.
Ensure that you run through the process yourself and think about it from a customer’s point of view:
- How easy is it for a customer to buy from my website?
- How can I remove the obstacles and streamline the process?
Once you have assessed these kinds of questions you can begin you put a structured plan in place.
Conclusion
Having an understanding of how SEO affects your business and sales is an essential part of growing your business online.
It’s best to look for an approach that is fully integrated and embraces everything we have discussed in this article.
Make sure that you know exactly who your target customer is and why they would be looking to make a purchase from you.
This will keep your keyword research and SEO efforts on track.
If you’re able to form that link, either through your own work or through an agency, this will ensure that you have an absolute connection between your SEO and sales and help your business perform well, while constantly growing.
