Is your business missing out on potential customers ready to shop in your area? Isn’t your business optimized for local search? Local SEO or search engine optimization determines the search rankings based on how fast the SEO can find your authentic website in a query.
What is a local SEO?
Local SEO refers to improving search engine visibility for local businesses, primarily those with brick-and-motor locations. Business can improve their organic traffic from searches made by local customers in nearby areas if they follow the best practices of local SEO. In short, local SEO allows you to better connect with people in your neighborhood, town, or city. For instance, whether a customer is searching for a shoe shop, a vehicle shop, or a new cafe near their geographical area, local SEO helps rank your website higher in search engines, provided your website is optimized for strong local search ranking. Any business that has a physical location and serves a particular geographic area can benefit from local SEO.
What are the three major factors that influence local SEO?
There are primarily three factors that influence which website should appear in the top local search results-
Proximity:
Proximity refers to how close your business is to the searcher. Google generates listings that are near the users. That is why listing your service area in your Google Business Profile is an effective way to ensure you show up in local searches in your proximity.
Relevance:
Your business relevancy depends on the products and services you offer and search queries. If someone searches for an ice cream shop, Google generates a list of businesses that offer ice cream.
Prominence:
Prominence refers to what customers say about your products and services. It comes as 1-5 star ratings on Google listing and the user comments and reviews. Google would list the names of those businesses with excellent ratings helping people get the best service for their needs.
How does your business benefit from local SEO?
Improve online visibility:
One of the staple local SEO activities is citation building. It is the process of building mentions of your company’s name, physical address, contact number, social media profiles, and online review platforms. As you do citation building in different places, you increase your chances of getting discovered by the right people actively searching for a business like yours to get the specific products and services they need.
Increase relevant traffic:
Nearly 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information. Local SEO increases your site traffic if you’ve registered your business digitally. Targeting the local potential customers will redirect local traffic to your site. It will consequently result in better conversion.
Keep the local economy alive:
People prioritize local businesses when it comes to their purchase decisions. Research says that people actively seek out locally sourced products and give their customs to local stores. As your business makes an effort to link and connect with the local community, it keeps the local economy up and alive. Also, having more reputable local backlinks is a great way to boost your rank, and this opens the door for supportive working relationships. One of the biggest benefits of local SEO is that it puts you in front of local consumers exactly when they need your products or services.
More calls and visits:
Optimizing your Google Business Profile is a great way to increase visibility on Google Maps. As Google Maps is specifically designed to help users find local information and services, this could lead to more calls and in-person visits from them. Google Maps use the information that Google gleans from Business profiles. Therefore, as you optimize your Google Business Profile, it will directly enhance your Maps visibility.
Better conversion rates:
As you optimize your website for local SEO, such as being consistent with the contact information, using the right keywords, strategic placement of your location, optimizing inbound links, improving page load speed, etc help in conversion rate optimization. It means you see an increase in the number of conversions your site generates like an increase in contact form submissions, more phone calls, more email subscriptions, and more sales.
Establishes business position:
Link building and local content marketing are the two essential strategies to establish the prominence and relevance of your products and service. It also helps you to cultivate a reputation as thought leadership. For instance, local content marketing will talk about your local area and the local community. It will not only help you grow your business position as an expert voice but will bring your existing and potential customers closer to your business, build brand loyalty, increase engagement and build stronger links.
Refining and improve your local SEO is a stepping stone to making your business more competitive and establishing its strong presence in search ranking results.
