How to Attract More Customers to My Business Using SEO

Customers and clients must find your business somehow. When you have a brick-and-mortar business, people can walk by and naturally visit your shop. But when your business is online, you need to focus on global and local SEO to attract more customers to your website, landing pages and offers.

I use a lot of strategies to attract more customers to my business online, but SEO is the backbone of every strategy.

Why?

What is Global and Local SEO?

SEO, short for search engine optimization, is the practice of optimizing your website to rank higher in the search results. Imagine if you went to Google, typed in a search for your main keyword associated with your product or service.

Would your site show up on page 1, or would you be buried on page 40?

A staggering 90% of pages get zero traffic from Google. Poor SEO is to blame, which leads to businesses making fewer sales and driving no leads to their website organically.

When you optimize your site, you’re working on one of two forms of optimization:

  • Global optimization that can be worldwide. Imagine if people typed “audio books” into Google. Chances are, Audible.com would show up across the world on the first page of the search results.
  • Local SEO is optimizing for your local area. A plumber, for example, can’t service customers globally, so he or she would want to rank for local search terms. “Plumber in Charlotte,” is one example of optimizing for local search terms.

Of course, SEO goes beyond Google. It encompasses all search engines. There are a few reasons to optimize for SEO rather than spend all of your ad dollars on other forms of marketing.

  • A staggering 70% of marketers find search optimization to be more beneficial than even pay-per-click advertising.
  • When you use search engine optimization, it’s a long-term strategy (it takes time), but it drives organic, targeted traffic to your site without additional expenses. You won’t have to pay for clicks, and you’ll be able to rank for a wide range of keywords.
  • The traffic that comes from search engines, if the right keywords are chosen, is highly targeted and well into the buying cycle. You can also rank for keywords to educate and build trust from your target demographic that may be in other stages of the buying cycle.

As a business owner, there’s a lot that you can do to optimize your site for search engines, but it’s often best to work with a professional that has experience helping businesses rank higher on Google.

How I Attract More Customers to My Business Using SEO

If you want to begin optimizing your site, there’s a lot that you can do to make immediate improvements. Whether or not these changes will lead to ranking in the first few pages of the search results really depends on your industry and the difficulty of the keywords chosen.

A few of the things that you can do to improve your own SEO and attract more customers are:

Add Your Business to Google My Business

If you have a local business, one of the best things that you can do to bring in organic traffic is to add your business to Google My Business. It’s completely free to add your business and allows for a few key benefits:

  • Your business will show up on Google Maps.
  • Tie Google reviews into your business to build credibility.
  • List your service area, address, phone number and additional information.

You can optimize your listing, too. A few tips for proper optimization include choosing the best category for your business, add all locations, add or edit service area details, and enter in important keywords into your listing, too.

If your business has been around for a few years, Google likely knows it exists – you just need to claim it. Verification is required, but you’ll be able to claim your business and gain full access to all features.

Optimize Your Site Using Keywords

What keywords are your potential customers and clients searching for? You can see which keywords get the most searches using a variety of tools:

You’ll want to search for keywords that your audience is already searching for. For example, “buy an iPhone” or “best deals on iPhones” may be two buyer keywords, whereas “need a new phone” can be a buyer keyword, or it may be someone researching the newest phones available.

Use the tools above to generate keywords for your product and/or service and add them into your meta tags, headers, content of your site and more. These keywords give search engines an indication of what your business is all about – but don’t overdo it. Stuffing keywords into your content can lead to your site being penalized.

Generate Local Links Where Possible

Links are one of the most powerful signals search engines use when ranking a website. Think of a link as a “vote” for your site, but it’s not easy to generate links without a strong content plan. The good news is that businesses have the opportunity to snag links from:

You might even be able to get links mentioning your business in your local college newspaper or on a chamber of commerce site. These links often come from highly respected websites that have a lot of value when trying to rank for keywords locally.

Read, Read and Read Some More

Education on the latest SEO trends and what you need to do to optimize your site is going to be ongoing. Algorithms change multiple times per year, and major updates can completely change what business owners do to optimize their sites.

You’ll want to continue learning from industry leaders SEJ, Moz, Brian Dean, Neil Patel and other sites dedicated to SEO.

And while our list is a good start, it’s just a small part of the SEO that you can do to a site. You’ll want to perform an audit, create keyword-rich content, fix any site errors, speed up your site, run a technical SEO analysis and make any required changes and build backlinks to your site – among numerous other things.