Even though the goal of SEO is to generate organic traffic for your business, most SEO techniques are all but organic. Sure, creating quality content, using adequate keywords and making them fit the context are both logical and intuitive solutions; however, marking pages as ‘noindex’ and ensuring that your posts generate links are not. Choosing proper headline structure (h1, h2) for your posts is something that you would probably do either way; however, it is unlikely that you would intuitively add meta tags as you go along. In other words, you need some help or at least some basic SEO training.

This leads us to our next big question: how big should a company be in order to justify outsourcing their SEO services or starting their own digital marketing department? Well, in a world where 78 percent of local mobile searches end up being offline purchases, there really is no such thing as too small. In fact, investing in SEO is something that brings positive ROI even to one-person startups. Still, for smaller businesses, it might be for the best to keep their SEO tactics local. Here are top five local SEO tactics for small businesses.

1. User-generated content (UGC)

The first thing you should start counting on is the support of the local community and there’s no better place to start extracting it than the local community itself. Think about it, your reviewers are people that probably belong to the demographic that you see as your target market. This means that marketing their reviews and ratings may resound even more strongly than you initially intended. Overall, the advantages of UGC are even greater in the smartphone era, where people can google your offer while in-store, just to confirm that the purchase is the right one for them, which only further supports the survey from the introduction.

2. Get a featured snippet

Another thing you need to do is get a featured snippet in order to establish immediate communication lines between you and your audience. Think about it, if the answer is straightforward, all you need is a quick piece of information, which can be obtained through a snippet without even having to click on the link. This usually takes place when you ask a question that can be answered in one or several sentences, when you need a simple result (a statistic or a measurement unit) or when you need an address.

3. Outsourcing to a local SEO company

While the algorithm is the same regardless of location, even in the English-speaking world, each region has its own peculiarities, jargon and its own set of rules. The part with the jargon is particularly important here, seeing as how proper keyword research is deeply intertwined with linguistics. For instance, internet users in Hong Kong may type in a different keyword than people in Australia when looking up the same thing online. That being said, it is probably for the best to outsource to a company that knows the local market. For instance, when entering a business hub such as Hong Kong, you should probably narrow down your search to Hong Kong SEO agencies.

4. Image optimization

As we’ve already mentioned (several times over), most local searches are mobile, which leads us to image optimization. In order to be responsive, your mobile images need to fit the smaller screen size, which is something that can be done either manually or through a plugin. The latter method automates the process, which makes it simpler and reduces the margin of error. Either way, going through with this saves you both time and effort.

5. Location-specific landing pages

Finally, if you have several stores and want to make each of them have its own website, it might be a good idea to assign a specific landing page for each location. In this way, you can further capitalize on the vicinity to your clients. Moreover, it supports your actual retail stores, which, once again, drives your sales. This trend can also be combined with image optimization discussed above, seeing as how it’s always smart to feature your store so that your audience can find it right away.

Conclusion

As you can see, the greatest difference between local and global SEO lies in the fact that the first tends to be, paradoxically, a bit more offline sale-oriented. Overall, your main job is not to drive traffic and make online conversions, but to use your online infrastructure in order to support your business offline. As complex as it may seem, this is definitely a trend that drives some incredible results.