Have you ever wondered that when you search for a product or a service online, you are always suggested the stores or the service providers near you? How is it done? This is because businesses take the help of a digital marketing technique called local SEO to promote their services to local customers. Local SEO strategies play a crucial role in helping businesses get their nearest customers to find their brand through online searches.
What is local SEO?
Local SEO focuses on providing results to a searcher that are relevant to the searcher’s current location. This involves the process of optimizing the online presence of a business to get traffic from local searches, which take on Google and other search engines. In general, the higher ranked on the search result page and the more frequent a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users; these visitors can be converted into valuable customers.
Benefits of using local SEO strategies
Much like regular SEO, local SEO is a series of actions and strategies designed to improve your visibility on various search engines when people close to your physical location perform a local search. Benefits of local SEO includes-
- Local SEO activity, such as citation building and helping brands in building online visibility
- Optimizing your site for local search helps to deliver more targeted traffic and thus helps in more relevant search terms
- Content marketing and link building improves
- Greater local visibility means more site traffic, more service customers, and thus resulting in more sales
- More effective incentive-based marketing campaigns
- Lots of repeat business
- Earn more trust through higher rankings
Impact of local SEO on Search Engines
These days, products and services can be found with a simple online search. Fortunately, SEO ensures that your website is there at the top of the search results to meet the requirements of the searchers. But, for a local business that wants to boost traffic, local SEO can cater to their requirements.
While SEO focuses on improving your website’s visibility on a national or global space, local SEO more specifically allows you to capture local search territory to connect with local searchers in your area. SEO aims to rank as high as it can for a specific set of keywords; the main aim of local SEO is to get into local listing packs. Also, local SEO is about being listed at every other place where potential customers might be there. For any SEO strategy, you should implement technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page to get the most out of your website. While both local SEO and SEO revolves around a similar plan to improve and optimize your site for search engines, only the strategy changes. You can read more about the impact of local search results on Google here.
How do local search results appear on SERPs?
To understand local search engine optimization, we have to know how local search results appear on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Local search results appears in four ways-
Organic Search Results:
These are earned when local businesses follow SEO best practices. The placement appears as a standard search result.
Paid Search Engine Results:
These are paid search ads. A local business pays for its search result to appear when people search for select keywords as a part of a pay-per-click marketing strategy. The ad designation on the result indicated that it is a paid placement.
Google My Business Results:
These are rich search results that display in a map or a featured listing. Businesses that appear in this rich search section have claimed and optimized their Google My Business page.
Google Guaranteed Listings:
These are also rich search results available for some service-based industries. A business that appears as a Google Guaranteed brand has signed up and been verified through Google’s program.
Local SEO tips for website optimization
At this point, you know what local SEO, its importance, and how local results appear on SERPs. Now you must be looking for tips on how to do local SEO. You can approach 7 SEAS Solutions, which serves as a one-stop destination for not only website optimization but for all your digital marketing needs. Meanwhile, here are some tips that can help you optimize your website using local SEO:
- Employ ways to make your site mobile-friendly
- Add NAP to your website, where the acronym NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. Make sure that you add this detail in the footer section of your website.
- Create a Google My Business page
- Build business citations
- Focus on link-signals
- Optimize title tags and meta descriptions for your location and category
- Target and optimize your site for local keywords
- Implement off-page SEO
- Get reviews for your business from happy customers
- Create a dedicated webpage for each product/services you offer
Websites are your home on the internet. With an optimized website having quality content, you will automatically rank better in the SERPs and thus can draw more traffic. But it needs to be remembered that local SEO is only a small part of the holistic digital marketing approach. If you want to know more about optimizing your brand online, get in touch with The Mitraya Solutions, catering to every digital marketing strategy.
FAQs
Why is local SEO important?
Local SEO is also known by the name as local Search engine marketing. It is also one of the best ways in online mode where you can promote your business products and services. Local SEO helps a company to market its products and services to nearby local customers. It is the best option as a company can easily track its customers and provide them services according to their need and requirement.
What are some common local SEO checklists?
Some local SEO checklists are as follows:
- Utilizing social media to promote the product/service
- It is important to take the reviews from the customers and design the product or the service accordingly.
- Add SEO-centric titles along with Meta description that states the features of the products and services.
- Interlinking as well as external linking can help you in getting traffic.
What is the role of page content in local SEO and map optimization?
Page content covers all the relevant data of the company and this data is extremely relevant to the search. Make sure that page content highlights all your products and services. Along with local SEO, make use of map optimization by making your business active on Google map and Bing map, that helps local users to find your business.