A complete guide: Local SEO

When you have a physical brick-and-mortar location, Local SEO plays an important role. Local search is powerful for small businesses: 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information. If your business isn’t optimized for local search, you could be missing out on potential local customers. In short, local SEO is critical if you want your business to stay relevant. 

Local SEO is a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that helps your business be more visible in local search results on Google. By following local SEO guidelines, businesses can improve organic traffic from searches performed by customers in nearby areas. 

Google takes your location into account when you search for a local keyword. There are many ways to make sure your business shows up in the right locally focused searches. Local SEO encompasses many techniques such as citation building, local link building, review generation, and much, much more. 

The heart of local SEO is your business information, and the main goal is to ensure that your business’s info (like name, phone number, website, email address, etc.) is correct all across the web. When your business’s information is correct and consistent everywhere online, search engines like Google see that as a sign that your business is trustworthy and relevant to the search. 

Moreover, smartphones make it easy to call your business or get directions. Potential customers can quickly click a button and call your business. Alternatively, with the click of a button have GPS directions directly to your business. Making it very convenient for people to do business with you. 

 

Do you need Local SEO? 

As a local business owner, you may feel there’s little point in investing time and money in your Google presence when a quick search shows you competing against the likes of Walmart and Amazon for positions. That might be true when it comes to the main organic listings but, for local prominence, it’s a different matter entirely.  

Any business that has a physical location or serves a geographic area can benefit from local SEO. If you search Google for any important keywords related to your business and a map with 3 listings appears underneath it (also known as a map pack), then local SEO can help you grow your business. Ultimately, local SEO plays an important part in your marketing activities as it puts your business in front of customers when they are searching for it on search engines. 

Multi-location businesses can also benefit from local SEO, even if they have a prominent, established brand. No matter how popular your brand is, if people can’t find your locations, they will choose your competitors instead of your business. 

 Importance of Local SEO 

“97% of consumers looked online for local businesses in 2017, with 12% looking for a local business online every day.” 

Both Google itself and the shopping public recognize the value and importance of local businesses. That means you don’t necessarily have to worry about big brand competition to get your local business in front of local consumers.  

How well-known your business is and how relevant your listings are will determine how good a local ranking your business has. If you’re at work and want to get a pizza delivered for lunch, for example, Googling “pizza delivery” shows a list of locations near your office. But if you try that same search at home, you’ll get an entirely different set of results. This makes sense, considering you need a pizza delivered from somewhere nearby.  

What does this mean to search marketers? Localized content and local link popularity are factors important in building local landing pages for each of your locations. This should be taken into consideration as well in your content marketing and link-building strategy.  

Now with a better understanding of SEO basics, you can start to concentrate on signals that will optimize your site in the local search ecosystem. This way your business can show up higher on the results page. It’ll lead to more potential customers finding your business. 

How to Use Local SEO? 

To gather information for local search, search engines rely on local content, social profile pages, links, and citations. They provide the most relevant local results to the user. 

With local SEO, you can position your products and services to local customers who are searching for them. 

Let us look into how you can harness Local SEO to your benefit. 

• Optimize your website for Google my business 

Create or sign up for a Google my business account. Encourage your customers to share their reviews online. Respond authentically to reviews, specifying the location. By having reviews and keeping your contact information, you’re improving the experience for potential customers to find you. 

• Connect your social media to Google my business 

Google considers content shared on social media more important now than ever before. Now that you’ve carved out a beautiful Google My Business page, share the page on social media.

• Ensure your name, address, and phone number are consistently online. 

Set up your NAP, which stands for name, address, and phone number (with area code). Also, include this as HTML text on your site. To reap the benefits of local SEO, you’ll need to revisit your on-site optimization.

Once you have the fundamentals down, it may be tempting to put your foot on the brake. However, SEO is an ongoing and intuitive process. This might sound simple enough, so for your local SEO to be effective, you’ll need to have an ongoing strategy. When left alone, online information changes almost constantly. To combat this, you need to be constantly sending the correct information to the most prominent local directories. 

Building citations on sites like Google, Facebook, and within relevant online directories such as Yelp or TripAdvisor gives your business more online visibility. It also helps your business to be found by the right people at the right time.  

Many factors influence your visibility in these searches, but keep in mind that local search continues to grow and change. To keep up with what signals are increasing and decreasing is important. Once you start to improve each important signal area, you’ll be able to serve more people in your local area. 

Whether you use a manual citations team or aggregator submissions, our citation-building services can push your data to thousands of online business directories, mobile apps, and mapping services worldwide. Contact us today!