Easy Guide To Local SEO for Philadelphia Small Businesses

A small business needs to work smarter to beat its competition, and there is no better example of this than local search engine optimization (SEO), the best way to promote long-term growth. Local SEO covers everything your business should have to get traffic, leads, and more.

Learn the basics of how to apply local SEO from a Philadelphia SEO agency’s recommended tactics, including:

• Defining local for Philadelphia small businesses
• Five easy tactics to use for the best local SEO

There’s a lot to discuss, so get ready to take notes.

Let’s go!

Want to learn more about the Digital Authority Partners approach to SEO? Watch this video!

What Is Local SEO?

Local SEO is a subset of SEO that targets a specific location and focuses efforts on raising your rank in local search results and increasing traffic. This is important because a website has a lower chance of getting clicks the farther down it sits on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Although local SEO mostly adds a target location to your keyword and content strategy, its effects are hard to deny. For instance, a Philadelphia photo and film studio that uses search terms such as “Philadelphia wedding” has a better chance of ranking in local searches.

Another local SEO tactic that Philadelphia small businesses need is building citations that mention their name, address, and phone number (NAP) on other websites. Although this can come from articles highlighting local businesses, most citations come from listings and directories.

The success of local SEO falls on you, as the owner (and your team), to build up ways that your target market can find your business online. This often means syncing your NAP and other profile data across many platforms and websites, which is vital. It is hard work that pays off big time.

Comparing SEO and Local SEO

Mostly, SEO and local SEO follow the same rules, such as aiming for high ranks on SERPs and high visibility on other channels to reach users. The main point of contrast is that in the former, you apply changes to reach a general audience that uses broad, generic keywords.

On the other hand, local SEO applies changes that help you reach a target market in a smaller area, such as a city or neighborhood. However, it does not mean that your content appears only to people living there; it shows up for anyone who uses the same local terms as your keywords, for example, people planning to travel to your area.

You can look at SEO and local SEO as a national versus local strategy, so you need to evaluate whether your small business benefits more from using the latter than the former. The point here is that how you use SEO, or which type you use, depends on the scope of your business and how you can serve customers.

If your Philadelphia small business is fully online and ships all over the United States, then a Philadelphia SEO company would likely suggest using both types of SEO to cover more areas. On the other hand, a local business with a physical store within Philadelphia is better off with just local SEO.

Local SEO for Philadelphia SMBs

For a Philadelphia small-to-medium business (SMB), local SEO is mostly there to promote their stores and increase brand awareness. Tactics range from creating written content, videos, and social media posts to running paid ads on select channels to reach as many people as possible.

Among the many methods an SMB should use, every Philadelphia SEO company will point to blogging as a critical place to start because it has the most effect on SERP rank. As you upload content to your website, search engine crawlers have more pages to index and show as results.

Like local listings and directories, social media apps are a major part of any local SMB SEO strategy. Apps such as TikTok and Instagram are great places for more exposure to a wide audience. A profile on a bigger site, such as Facebook, also allows more searchers to find you.

Overall, local SEO for Philadelphia SMBs aims to attract as much local traffic back to their website as possible and make more people aware of the brand. 

5 Tactics for Local SEO Success

Success is what you get when you work smart, and one way to do that is by having a solid local SEO plan. Start with a checklist of SEO elements your Philadelphia SMB needs the most. Here is a simple outline of five tactics that your local SEO strategy should include for greater success:

1. Start your strategy with a healthy dose of research. Every part of your local SEO strategy must be based on facts. For instance, you cannot just declare that “Philadelphia bike shop” is a good target keyword without knowing if your target market even uses it.

2. Choose which channels you want to use to reach your target market. Your audience has as many options as you do for online channels, which means you must know where to find them to reach them. Study their online habits through surveys to get a clearer idea.

3. Create a content strategy for local SEO. For most SMBs, this refers to blogging, but you do not have to restrict yourself to just written content. Social media posts require a content strategy, including target keywords (hashtags), post schedule, and online brand.

4. Once your local SEO strategy is up and running, you must monitor how well it performs. You can easily get insights and analytics for your website through tools such as Google Analytics and Google Keyword Planner. Use these insights to improve results.

5. Local SEO trends are always changing, so updating yourself on the news is just as important for success. What worked before might not work again, or at least not as well. Be adaptable and prepare to make necessary changes.

Summing Up

Philadelphia SMBs need local SEO to build their brands online because they easily get overtaken by other brands in the SERPs without it. Knowing what to do and where to start is critical. Easy guides, such as local listings and content, can get you set up and started in the right direction.

Need help formulating a local SEO strategy for your Philadelphia SMB? Contact Digital Authority Partners to learn how we can help.