Local SEO is the strategy of creating more awareness about local business using the online domain through suitable use of location-based keywords. You may have some of the best products and services for the local market but they won’t sell much if the local customers are not aware about them. Local SEO creates awareness about your business, products, services in the local market and enhances your visibility and sales. The current article provides detailed insights into local SEO- its importance, tips for getting the best results, local SEO ranking factors, and on-site adjustments for better local SEO results.
Why Your Business Needs Local SEO
Local SEO is an emerging and popular strategy for most businesses to create a footprint in the local market. It helps you to improve your visibility in the local market and become an authority figure in the market. The key reasons why your business needs local SEO are as follows:
Improved Local Business Visibility
The most important benefit of effective local SEO campaign on your business is improved local business visibility. You can optimize your on-page and off-page SEO initiatives which can help to improve the search engine rankings of your website. You can use online business citations to further improve the online visibility of your business. Listing your business on credible local business directories is also a great way to build traction and visibility in the local market. Other effective local SEO strategies include adding plenty of relevant photographs in your Google My Business (GMB) profile and getting credible links from local blogs to build authority and visibility in the local market.
Increased Traffic
Local SEO initiatives help to drive more organic traffic to your website. It does so by improving your search engine rankings. If your website is displayed in the first page of a search result, then it will have greater chances of being visited by the users who made the search. It is a known fact that majority of the users don’t go beyond the first page in a search result. Local SEO ensures that your website is displayed in the first page of the search results through undertaking a series of planned off-site and on-site SEO initiatives.
The chances of your visitors getting converted into customers are also higher using local SEO compared to other promotional channels and strategies. This is due to the fact that people who are searching for your product and services only will visit your website. As they are already in need of such products and services, they are more likely to buy from you.
Reduced Advertising Expenditure
Local SEO focuses on organic traffic for sales and revenue. It may take some time compared to paid promotional strategies, but once you gain traction and visibility, local SEO can ensure continued influx of visitors to your website. It requires no or minimal expenditure and hence does not strain your business finances. It also contributes towards reducing the advertisement expenditure on other paid channels like Google AdWords for acquiring new customers. This is particularly helpful for new and small businesses which cannot afford to spend heavily on promotion and customer acquisition. Hence, adoption of local SEO initiatives helps you to minimize your expenditure on promotion and maximize your business visibility and sales in a very cost-effective manner.
Build Authority and Credibility
When you undertake local SEO initiatives, you will be more focused on the specific needs of the local markets and customers. This will slowly make you emerge as a credible business with authority on the specific niche in which you deal. When you invest time and resources in creating unique and relevant content specially developed for the local market, you are more likely to get links back to your website from reputed local blogs. These links will help you to further strengthen and consolidate your position as a prominent player and authority figure in your niche among the local customers. This is likely to increase your market visibility and sales drastically.
Tips for Getting Best Local SEO Results
All businesses using local SEO want to get the desired results. However, you need to be patient and stay committed to the cause for getting the best results. In order to get the best local SEO results, you should consider the below-mentioned tips:
Know Your Target Audience
The first step towards undertaking an effective local SEO campaign is to know your target audience. You can create unique and customized content for them only if you know their characteristics and preferences. The target audience can have different demographic features and differing needs. You can segment them using multiple filters like age, gender, income groups, hobbies, etc. to create unique content for them which they find relevant. Many businesses adopt a multi-website approach which is not a good idea. You should have only one website for your business as it will be easier to remember for the visitors. The content should be targeted and relevant to the needs of your target audience for you to get traction and desired local SEO results
Use Images
You should use lots of high-quality and relevant photographs in your Google My Business (GMB) listings. Adding relevant photographs increases the actions on your listings at least 10 times. This also leads to getting the desired authority and search engine rankings for your business. Using images considerably increases the engagement with your local business page especially from mobile devices. Users can easily check your photographs and swipe through them quickly while checking your GMB listings.
Build Links for Visibility
Building better links plays a crucial role in any SEO campaign. You should build and earn better links for improving the visibility of your website and its search engine rankings. If you are a local business, then it is recommended to earn authentic and credible local links. This can be done by joining conversations in local business blogs. You can leave constructive comments and link their website on your blogs. This will help you to develop relationships with other relevant local businesses which is a great way to earn good local links and enhance your content’s visibility. In addition to getting local links, you should also focus on building backlinks which are important for improving your website’s ranking. Backlinks help you to build better authority and trust in the business which contributes towards building a strong Google listing and improves your website’s search engine ranking.
Build Citations
Citations refer to the use of your business’s name, address, contact details, website, etc. anywhere on the internet, even if they are not backed by any links to your website. It is important to note that you should build citations for only physical locations of your business. Building citations for P.O. boxes, virtual addresses, etc. are not allowed. For every business location that you have, you should try to build a unique citation. You should ensure that the name of your business, address, contact details, etc. are correct and should ideally match with your GMB listing. Not doing so will create inconsistencies in citations which can impact your local SEO efforts and reduce your website’s search ranking.
Use Local Search Engines and Blogs
If you want to have a successful local SEO campaign, then you should strongly consider listing your business on local search engines like Yelp, Foursquare, etc. Doing so helps search engines like Google and Bing to crawl the web for business citations which is used for updating the information on their indexes. You should invest time in listing your business on as many credible local directories as possible. Local blogs are another excellent way of getting your business listed for taking advantages of local SEO. These local blogs are indexed and associated with particular localities, cities, regions, etc. When you start getting links from these local blogs, your business will be viewed as legit and credible by search engines which will increase your website’s search engine ranking. You should search the top industry-specific blogs in your locality and use them to earn links to your websites for improved search engine ranking and greater visibility.
Local SEO Ranking Factors
When you use local SEO, your key objective is to help improve the search engine rankings for your website and drive more organic traffic to it. The increased traffic can be converted for registering more sales and revenue. Before you plan for undertaking an effective local SEO campaign, you should understand the factors which influence and affect the local SEO ranking factors. this will help you to devise better local SEO strategies. The key local SEO ranking factors are as follows:
Verify Your Google My Business (GMB) Profile
The GMB profile for your business is critical for improving your search engine rankings and ensuring the success of your local SEO efforts. Your GMB profile should be consistent which is very important for getting the desired results. The GMB profile details should match with your website and also with the NAP citations. This helps search engines to establish that your business is legit and authentic which helps to improve its search engine rankings. The business address on the GMB profile should be mentioned in the same way as it appears everywhere else. If you have used the words “Apt” for apartment, then you should follow the same format in your GMB profile. Your GMB profile should be complete and you should not leave any unfilled sections. This helps search engines to know what your business really is and what it deals in.
NAPs
NAPs (Name, Address, Phone Number) citations are important for successful local SEO campaigns. Search engines use your NAP citations to verify your business details from other sources like your website, GMB profile, etc. If the NAP citations are found to be matching and consistent with these details, your business is seen as credible by the search engines. This leads to your business appearing in relevant searches and improvement of your search engine ranking.
Get Reviews
Reviews on your websites are very important to get the top local rankings. More than 80% of online users check reviews and ratings. Of this, 97% of the users say that their buying decisions are influenced by the reviews. If you have reviews less than 4 or 5 stars, then you will find it tough to attract customers. A recent study found that increasing your online reviews by 1 star boosts your revenues by nearly 10%, which is indicative of the importance of getting good reviews.
Every business will also get negative reviews at some point of time. Whether the review is positive or negative, it is imperative to reply to each one of them. This is a strong indication to the potential customers that you care for and value them. You can post comforting and soothing replies to negative reviews as it will help to pacify the customers and will also take lot of the bite out of the negative reviews.
Tips for Updating Your Website for Better Local SEO
You can make different on-site adjustments to get better local SEO results. Some of the salient on-site adjustments for the same are discussed below:
Better Internal Linking Structure
While getting external links to your website is important to increase visibility and search engine rankings, you can also improve your local SEO results by adjusting your internal linking structures. Internal links connect one page of a website to another page within the same website. Thus, effective internal linking structure can help improve the navigation within the website and make it seamless for the end-user to do so. This will improve the end-user experience. Internal linking also defines the architecture and hierarchy of a website. It can also help to improve authority and ranking power through the multiple pages of a website.
Optimize URL, Heading, Meta Description
Each blog which you add to your website is a new page which needs to be optimized for getting the best local SEO results. You should view each new page on your website as an opportunity to improve your search engine rankings through planned SEO initiatives, thereby increasing your visibility and business prospects. When you add new content or pages to your website, you need to ensure that it is optimized according to your SEO campaign. You can use high ranking keywords in the blog and URL to improve search rankings. Optimizing headers, meta description, and general content also helps to improve your visibility. Your content should have locally targeted content to reach out more effectively to the local market and customers.
Add Location Pages
If you have multiple offices or stores, you should consider creating location pages. Your visitors will be able to get useful information like NAP, business hours, parking or other amenities availability, promotions, testimonials, reviews, etc. about your business. However, you should also take care not to duplicate content across multiple locations as it will not help to improve your search engine rankings. Creating unique content for different locations can help you get better search rankings and drive more organic traffic to your website. If you are functional in those locations, then you have good chances of converting the traffic to customers also.
If you are based out of a single location only, then you should create a strong “About Us” page which will help to describe your business to the visitors. If you add a Google Map on your website for different locations, then you can get much better search engine rankings and visibility among the online visitors.
Create Local Content
You should make your content relevant to the local market and customers in order to gain traction. You should understand that the content has to be written for the local market as the end-user and not merely for the search engines. Over time, search engines have become smarter with their algorithms and understand the content which is truly developed for the local customers as the end-users. If you write on wider and more generic topics, you may attract a larger crowd, but the content may not be useful to them. This may lead to the visitors not returning back to your website again. You should focus and narrow down your target audience to write content which meets their specific requirements. Your focus should be to emerge as an authority in the local market for a given niche.
Ensure Your Website Has Responsive Design
Local searches are mostly done on mobile devices. It is known that nearly 90% of all internet users use their mobile devices to conduct local searches. Looking for reviews, searching for directions, etc. are some of the most common ways online users can know about you and find your business. In order to take advantage of this, your website should use a responsive design. This means that the website will be displayed in a single consistent manner irrespective of whether you view it on a desktop or mobile device. If your website does not display in the same way as it is supposed to be viewed on a desktop device, then the end-users will have a difficult time browsing and navigating through it and may not return again. Another advantage of a responsive design is that you don’t have to design multiple websites differently for desktop and mobile platforms.