5 Powerful Local SEO Strategies For Small Businesses
Small businesses get all types of daily advice from marketing experts about how to sell services or products to local customers. However, you have to take note that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach. However, if you want to get better results, you must prioritize local SEO for your business.
Generally, local SEO is one of the best ways to optimize your website since it’ll help your local customers find you. It’s valuable because it provides your potential customers access to everything related to your business, like a physical address. To reap its amazing benefits for your small business, the only thing you need to do is to implement some powerful local SEO strategies.
Fortunately, there are countless strategies you can use for your local SEO. If you don’t know where to get started, hiring a local SEO agency may benefit you and your business as you’ll get to stay on the right track.
If you want to do your best and rely on your skills first, below are some of the best local SEO strategies you can try for your small business:
1. Be Mobile-Friendly
Any SEO company will tell you that it’s vital for your business to be mobile-friendly. Just think of the number of individuals who use smartphones these days. In fact, almost everyone uses mobile devices to access the internet more often than desktop devices. For this reason, most local searches are frequently done using smartphones. So, make sure that your website content is mobile-friendly and don’t forget to use local citations. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself neglected by most of your customer base.
2. Optimize Your Images
When it comes to local SEO, optimization isn’t only limited to text. Because of the blended nature of the search results, images can be seen on the search listings page, so it’s crucial to optimize your images for search engines.
Since search engines cannot read images, make sure that your images are all SEO-friendly by using alt tags to describe your image in a way that search engines will understand. Just make sure to combine it with a relevant and concise description that contains the best keywords appropriate for the images.
3. Clean Backlinks
Once you decide to implement local SEO in your business, it’s crucial to use backlinks. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t use them properly. It can be a problem since Google will penalize content or websites with bad backlinks, including the ones with a link to some problematic domains.
Penalties can reduce your search engine rankings, which can be problematic especially for small businesses. So, make sure to clean up your backlinks to maintain your search engine ranking.
4. Provide Good Content
Search engines now value quality over quantity. In the past several years, poorly created website content might have worked great for SEO. However, at present, Google prioritizes content that adds value to people’s lives.
Luckily, it provides small businesses a chance to make content that sets them apart from their big rivals to reach the top search engine ranking. Just don’t focus on making plenty of content but concentrate on making quality content with appropriate keywords.
5. Attract Quality Reviews
For local businesses, you can check your Google My Business page, which appears in the sidebar of Google during searches. Basically, this page features business reviews and such can be some of the first things consumers see when looking for your business. That’s the reason why it’s vital to attract quality reviews from your happy and satisfied customers. You can do this by encouraging your customers to leave reviews for you.
Conclusion
With today’s highly competitive market, it isn’t easy to outrank your competitors. But it’s never impossible if you’ll implement the listed local SEO strategies for your small business.
Once you’ve done it properly, you can be assured that you’ll get nothing but results, such as reaching more potential customers and better exposure in your local area.
Getting Started With Plesk Extensions & Tools
For web developers & sysadmins, managing multiple sites and servers can include endless tasks that take up your entire day and leave no space for new projects. So that’s why at Plesk we want you to start with the best tools in place, freeing you to take on more tasks and grow your business.
So you’ve got your Plesk license sorted, your sites & servers synced to the control panel, and you’re ready to optimize your workload quickly and easily. Where do you start? Here is a list of top extensions that simplify, automate and speed up your setup and maintenance.
Let’s get started:
Setting up your sites & servers
Here are the best tools and kits to get started:
The Plesk WordPress Toolkit
The world-famous WordPress Toolkit sites developed by Plesk packs a punch of power. If you’re managing your sites on WordPress, this is without a doubt the place to start:
- One-click installment
- Single dashboard to manage multiple instances
- Default security scanner that blocks attacks
- Testing environment to stage features with no separate server
- Centralized updates to mass-manage themes and plugins
- Easy for beginners, great for developers
With access to CLI, search engine index management, cloning, migration tools and beyond, WordPress users and web developers have a clear place to start safely and efficiently.
Smart Updates (for the Plesk WordPress Toolkit)
The Plesk WordPress Toolkit is particularly well suited to work in conjunction with other plugins, as is the nature of WordPress itself. Another top extension to optimize your WordPress sites is Smart Updates.
Automatically updating your WordPress site or multiple sites is far easier than doing each one manually, but it comes with a risk – the update could break your sites, and backtracking is difficult and costly. With Smart Updates, the extension tests your auto updates in a testing environment to make sure there are no problems before applying to update to your live site. Just like that!
The Plesk eCommerce Toolkit
Another powerful toolkit in the Plesk extension library helps you set up eCommerce stores from scratch – that’s right, from top to bottom.
With the eCommerce Toolkit extension, web developers and inexperienced retailers alike can enjoy the full power of online selling in just a few steps:
- Create a website complete with personalized domain, products and shopping cart
- Connect to EVO Payments or other gateways to make secure transactions
- Broadcast products across multiple selling platforms like social media & Amazon
- Sync with existing PoS systems
For an A to Z kit specifically designed for online retailers, this kit is a top-notch solution available directly through Plesk.
Securing & backing up your data
Once you’ve taken the first steps to getting your sites and servers online and running, the next step is keeping everything safe.
Backup to Cloud Pro
First things first: You have to keep your data safe.
The popular Backup to Cloud Pro extension allows you to keep your backups safely in the cloud of your choice: AmazonS3, Google Drive, SFTP Backup, Dropbox, DigitalOcean Spaces, or MicrosoftOneDrive. These backups can be scheduled to repeat automatically, so you don’t have to do a thing. From a security perspective, this extension is a great place to start.
ImunifyAV & Imunify360
Two great products from one powerful security giant. Imunify provides the best immunity (pun intended) against viruses, adware spyware, trojans, and worms.
With ImunifyAV, you can equip your site with the essentials for combatting various threats in real-time, keeping your sites locked and closely monitored. It also smartly manages reputation, blacklists, and malware cleanup.
Upgrading to Imunify360 packs in even more security features to ensure the best, automated system tracking your sites. It includes everything you get in ImunifyAV, plus additional firewall software, hardened PHP, some integrations with backup, and more. It is the complete security detail you need to keep your inventory safe without a fuss.
Plesk Email Security
Moving on to your mailing. If you want to safely manage your mailing system on the Plesk control panel, Plesk Email Security is the place to start.
Spam can be a real nuisance, and viruses can present a real threat to your privacy and data. With this extension, advanced anti-spam filters keep spam and ham under control server-wide. Even more importantly, the pro version allows you peace of mind with antivirus technology designed to recognize and learn about harmful content. With this tool scanning all emails, managing DNS blacklists, and blocking unwanted content, you can start using Plesk for email too without a worry.
KernelCare
Now it’s time to keep the safety of your OS in check.
Web developers know that the integrity of your kernel is paramount. So this extension in the Plesk catalog, KernelCare, does exactly what it says on the tin: it takes care of your kernel and thereby protects Linux servers against vulnerabilities.
Updates are checked every few hours, and can take place without rebooting the server. This stops service interruptions happening due to server downtime, and the extension monitors this uptime too. This security patching is a web developer’s dream, as it works on a live site automatically without causing anything to go offline.
Monitoring your sites
Many of the above extensions have monitoring features related to their specific area of expertise. However, we suggest getting started with performance monitoring too, to have a real understanding of your inventory through and through.
Google PageSpeed Insights
This add-on takes your sites to the next level. The performance of your site in terms of speed and optimization is key for creating fast, useful sites. And Google PageSpeed Insights analyzes your site content and performance to suggest the best steps to take to improve.
Plus, as it supports SEO efforts, your sites’ visibility is vastly improved. Plus, as an extension built for Google, the top search engine, you know your insights are accurate and helpful!
Plesk WordPress Toolkit 5.9 Release Now Available
The last major WordPress Toolkit release in 2021 — v5.9.0 — is now officially available for Plesk. This quick release adds more site vulnerability goodness with a number of important bug fixes. As there have already been major developments in the 5.8 release, this newest update is building on those existing features:
Site Vulnerability: Policies
It’s hugely beneficial that you can now update or disable vulnerable WordPress assets in WordPress Toolkit once you learn that they’re vulnerable. However, you must log in and perform these actions manually, even if it’s not a convenient time for you. To make life easier for site admins, we have added advanced auto-update policies that allow site admins to make sure that vulnerabilities that can be fixed by installing updates are addressed by WordPress Toolkit automatically. In the case of plugins, site admins can also opt to deactivate them instead of updating (before you ask, we can’t do the same with themes, since there must always be an active theme on a site).
Security updates for vulnerabilities are installed immediately after these vulnerabilities are found; there is no ~24 hour wait period. Also, there is no special auto-update policy for WordPress core, since minor WordPress auto-updates already handle this case.
Finally, if you’re a server admin, keep an eye on future release as we’re planning to introduce auto-update defaults specifically to suit your needs. This should help keep the servers secure even when some customers forget to look after their sites.
Site Vulnerability: Email Notifications
As we’ve mentioned, you can easily learn if you have vulnerabilities when you visit WordPress Toolkit. But this could cause you to miss this information because you don’t visit your control panel that much. To address this, we have added email notifications about security vulnerabilities found by WordPress Toolkit:
These notifications differ from our usual email notifications — they are sent immediately after WordPress Toolkit finds a vulnerability, without any delay. Once a notification about a particular vulnerability on a particular site is sent, we will not repeat it to avoid spamming.
The differences between hybrid and native mobile apps
With more than 141 billion app downloads across iOS and Android in 2020 alone (a number that is expected to grow to 184 billion by 2024) more businesses than ever are looking to expand their digital portfolio with a mobile solution.
As a result of this opportunity, however, the marketplace has become competitive, and only the most well-researched applications tend to succeed. Now, crucial to success is the decision of what type of app to build: A native product fine-tuned to the requirements of a single marketplace, or a hybrid application capable of delivering a consistent experience across the entire mobile ecosystem.
As performance, user experience, market coverage and ease of maintenance become increasingly pivotal to product success, we run down the differences between hybrid and native applications, dissecting the pitfalls and opportunities of each.
What are native mobile apps?
A Native App is a type of software or program that has been developed to function within a particular platform or environment. They are built for specific software frameworks, hardware platforms, or operating systems.
There are two main mobile frameworks that combined account for 99% of devices worldwide: Google’s Android, which controls around 72% of the market, and Apple-owned iOS, which accounts for 27%.
What are the advantages of native apps?
Native applications have the edge in three key areas: Speed, User Interface (UI) and Robustness.
When building native applications developers are able to take full advantage of the functionalities specific to that framework. The result of this is peak performance, consistent UX and UI across devices and a codebase that is, generally speaking, a little more stable.
This is particularly true on iOS, where Apple has not only built the operating system, but they produce the devices themselves. This allows for an unmatched level of predictability and consistency across the Apple ecosystem.
That being said, if multiple native applications are being used to gain whole-of-market coverage, making live fixes becomes significantly more difficult.
Native applications provide peak performance for businesses that require unparalleled performance and unbeatable user experience. Although hybrid applications come closer to native-level every day, there is still a gap to consider.
What are the disadvantages of native apps?
A key disadvantage of building a native app is that you automatically lose partial market coverage. In such a competitive mobile landscape, completely disregarding either iOS or Android can be detrimental to your product launch.
Building two native apps to cover both Android and iOS is also costly and time-consuming. Instead of working on one code base, two development teams have to work on two different code bases. Code cannot simply be copied from one platform to another. It needs to be rewritten.
This raises the cost of development significantly and increases the time it takes to launch your app.
It should also be noted that the post-launch support process is significantly more labour intensive should you produce two applications. Fixes must be made across both codebases, and the opportunity for operating system bugs to occur is effectively doubled.
Whilst native mobile app development allows you to produce the most powerful bespoke products, the production and further support is a massive undertaking and shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Technologies used for native app development
Swift
Swift is a robust and intuitive programming language created by Apple for building apps for iOS, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Watch. Swift is open-source, with an extensive support network of developers and documentation.
Kotlin
Kotlin is a reputable programming language with vast open-source tools and libraries to help developers build native Android applications. Kotlin is a more stable and congruous development of Java, which has been used to develop android applications since its inception in 2008.
What are hybrid mobile apps?
Hybrid, or cross-platform mobile applications, are developed to function across multiple mobile platforms or frameworks. These apps are compatible with both iOS and Android, allowing for 99% market coverage.
By choosing hybrid app development, companies receive the significant benefits of faster turnaround time, lower costs, a quick deployment, and ease of ongoing management. These factors help businesses realise an ROI higher than what could often be obtained through native app development.
Cross-platform applications use a library of native-styled modules that can be used to create a near-perfect user experience across devices. It should be noted, however, that creating two native applications would still give you the edge in this respect.
What are the advantages of hybrid apps?
Quicker Turnaround:
The sooner your mobile app is developed and deployed, the sooner you’ll be reaping the benefits from it.
Because only one cross-platform app needs to be developed in order to achieve functionality on all platforms, rather than the multiple apps that would be required when building native apps, hybrid app development takes much less time than native app development.
And that’s not the only reason for the quick turnaround. Code used to create hybrid apps can be reused, so app developers can tap into their library of already-coded modules to assemble these applications more efficiently each time. Any code specific to a company’s first mobile app can also be reused in later, related company mobile apps.
Reduced Costs
This one’s a simple matter of doing the maths. Less time and effort spent in development equals lower cost.
With only a single mobile app to develop and maintain, not only does hybrid app development move more quickly, but QA processing, deployment and support are made easier. The time and monetary costs of developing your product are reduced dramatically by opting for cross-platform mobile app development, allowing your business to see ROI more quickly.
What are the limitations of hybrid apps?
If one of your priorities is providing a user experience that is consistent with the operating system and with the majority of the other apps available on that platform, then a hybrid app may not be the right solution for your business.
That doesn’t mean that you cannot provide a good mobile user experience with a web app or a hybrid app – it just means that the system graphics may not be exactly the same as those with which users may be already accustomed. This can negatively impact your user experience.
In addition, if your product relies on getting the absolute maximum amount of performance from the operating system, your idea may be better suited to a native application. Whilst cross-platform applications are still powerful and suitable for the vast majority of use cases, they still fail to achieve the same performance as a native application.
Technologies used for hybrid application development
Flutter
Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit created by Google. It is used to develop applications for Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows, Google Fuchsia, and the web from a single codebase.
React Native
React Native is an open-source mobile application framework created by Facebook, Inc. It is used to develop applications for Android, Android TV, iOS, macOS, tvOS, Web, Windows and UWP by enabling developers to use React’s framework along with native platform capabilities.
A Note on User Experience
In today’s market where there are millions of mobile applications, web platforms and digital products available, good UI/UX is no longer a feature- it is expected. Applications with no consideration to aesthetic usability create the impression of a subpar product, regardless of their ability to function or solve a specific problem.
Both native applications and cross-platform/hybrid apps have the capacity to create intuitive experiences. Whilst hybrid applications allow you to create continuity over different platforms, the OS-specific UI elements used in native applications create the best possible UX, user interface elements directly from the operating system.
To find out more on the importance of UI & UX, read our recent insight ‘The Difference Between UX and UI Design’
How to choose the right app type?
When we take a closer look at native and hybrid apps, the benefits of both approaches become more evident. All you have to do is to compare the core features of these approaches with the needs and expectations of your company.
For example, native mobile apps provide excellent UX and speed with an unparalleled user experience. Therefore, they are a great choice for companies that work with sensitive data, want to create a technically intense product, or only need to serve a single user base (either Android or iOS).
On the other hand, there’s cross-platform functionality provided by hybrid apps. This feature is invaluable for businesses that want to achieve whole of market coverage whilst keeping development speeds high and maintaining relatively low support and maintenance costs.
It’s important to understand that it’s not the nature of hybrid and native apps that determines if your idea will be successful or not. The crucial thing is the ability of developers to build upon your ideas and ensure that core business objectives are met in the solution they produce.
The Difference Between UX and UI Design
As the quality of web and mobile applications on the market continues to improve, UI and UX are no longer considered luxuries. In fact, thousands of applications fail to meet their user or revenue targets every year as a lack of focus on usability makes them seem subpar- regardless of their ability to perform.
What are UX and UI design? Why are they important and why can’t we afford to ignore them? Read on for our insight into why usability is so important in 2022.
What are User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX)?
User Interface or UI refers to all visual elements that can be seen when interacting with a digital product. Everything from the text we read to the buttons we press, UI is the part of the application that ensures you understand and navigate through the app as intended.
User experience or UX is the overall perception/feel/attitude a user has when interacting with a product. UX doesn’t start and end with the opening and closing of an application. User experience can both be online and offline and can be considered a collective of every interaction between a user interacts and product.
UI/UX designers work to bridge the gap between user and device in a way that helps users understand their task within the app and allows them to seamlessly navigate the interface.
In order to gain a sense of what attributes to successful UI/UX, we spoke to the Netsells design team: Lead Designer Scott Broughton and UI/UX Designers Connor McLeod and Bartek Marzec. Here are our key takeaways:
What Makes for a Good UI?
- A good UI acts as an extension of the brand, continuing core messaging.
- Designed with accessibility consideration according to documentation such as Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and Google’s Material Design foundations.
- A responsive interface that follows the user journey, providing feedback as the user navigates the app.
- Easy to use and understand.
What Makes for a Good UX?
- Good UX is always intuitive.
- Designed according to the scenarios and environment users will interact with the final product. For example, a fitness application intended to track active training sessions will need to be designed so that users can spend their time performing the activity without monitoring the application.
- Good UX moulds to meet the changing habits/demands of the user. There is never an endpoint. Great products learn from how users interact with the product and constantly iterate.
What Makes for Bad UI/UX?
- Designed in isolation from user needs and business goals. Design that is solely based on assumptions without user research cannot properly cater to their needs.
- Not having a clear purpose. As UI/UX are processes for delivering high quality and performing product it is vital for the success of any app to answer the why question early and use it as a guiding star to build upon.
- ‘Reinventing the wheel’ with unnecessary or over-complicated design. Pushing the boundaries is great if done correctly, but most often complicated design attributes to the downfall of a product. In our experience, this is most often through the poor structure of visual elements and overly focusing on trendy aesthetics rather than usability.
How do UX and UI work together?
Both UI and UX supplement each other. UX can be considered the framework of human interaction with a product, whilst the UI is the visual aspect that the user actually interacts with, be it the buttons on a mobile application or the drop-down menu on a PWA.
Whilst it is important that all product team roles collaborate closely from the beginning of a development lifecycle, UI teams tend to form the primary building blocks for most projects. Throughout this process, the features and functionalities that are required from both a user and stakeholder perspective are gathered, mapped and planned.
The UI team then takes the framework developed by the UX team, creating and developing the wireframes that will ultimately inform the user interface for the final application. This happens regardless of platform (mobile, web, etc.)
Throughout the entire process, stakeholder and user input is vital to ensuring the success of the UI and UX processes.
Is UX or UI more important for Digital Product Development?
User Experience is more important in the early stages of product design, with designers working to balance stakeholder and user requirements for the creation of a viable Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
It’s vital to strike that balance when creating a UX framework so that UI Designers can work from this pool of knowledge and form an enhanced understanding of how certain sections need to function in terms of interface.
Simply put: UI and UX are Inseparable in their nature, and they should be considered equally important to success. A functioning application needs to have an informed visual design just as much as it needs to perform against it’s target goals.
In today’s market where there are millions of mobile applications, web platforms and digital products available, good UI/UX is no longer a feature- it is expected. Applications with no consideration to aesthetic usability create the impression of a subpar product, regardless of their ability to function or solve a specific problem.