The basic pattern of purchasing products/services is – customers type what they want, google show them the best nearby result, & they select according to their needs.
Now the big question for business owners is;
Q1. Your products/services show up at exactly that time when the local customers are looking?
Q2. Is your business showing on the first page – especially in the first 5 positions?
Q3. & If your business is showing in the first 5 positions, will customers pick your business as their best solution?
Local SEO is the best way to find the answer to above mention questions.
Now, What is Local SEO?
Local SEO is a part of SEO strategy that helps your business to gain visibility in the local search result of SERP
Local SEO mainly works on a regional basis rather than country-specific.
Any business that has a physical location can get advantages of local SEO.
Let’s find out Why you need to go for Local SEO?
Let’s dive into some more interesting facts about local SEO:
1. 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information. (Source: GoGulf)
2. 72% of consumers that did a local search visited a store within five miles. (Source: HubSpot Marketing Statistics)
3. 97% of people learn more about a local company online than anywhere else. (Source: SEO Tribunal)
4. 88% of searches for local businesses on a mobile device either call or visit the business / offline store within 24 hours. (Source: Nectafy)
5. 61% of mobile searchers are more likely to contact a local business if they have a mobile-friendly site. (Source: HubSpot Marketing Statistics)
6. 18% of local smartphone searches led to a purchase within a day, whereas only 7% of non-local searches led to a sale. (Source: Think with Google)
7. “Near me” or “close by” type searches grew by more than 900% over two years. Like “mobile shop nearby me”, etc. (Source: Chat Meter)
8. 28% chances are increased in sales when your business is shown on local searches. (Source: Joel House Search Media)
Now the next big question is that how you can optimize your business for Local SEO?
Here are the best ways which help you to improve your local SEO.
A) Setup Your Google My Business Account:
- Google my business is the best way to gain visibility on google maps & on local search results.
- Google My Business allows you to optimize your presence on SERP.
- Providing the right information about your business and getting more positive reviews about your business, you’ll improve your ranking.
- Follow the below mention steps to optimize to improve local SEO.
- First, verify the business on google my business.
- Provide the right information, like address, contact number, business category, products/services, business info, logos & business photos.
- Try to get the review from your customers, because more authentic reviews = more trust = higher chance for business visit
- Try to do regular posts on google my business accounts.
B) Setup/Optimize the Social Media Profiles
- If you optimize your social media profile in a specific way, then you will get some of the major benefits from that, Such as getting valuable traffic, increase visibility in your location, inquiries, and lots of other things.
- By connecting with the right groups, posts, stories, reels, IGTVs, paid ads, you can reach your targeted audiences.
- When you started all of the social activities, you will connect with more audiences from your location, & that will create a really good impact on your business.
- Know here the importance of social media especially after Covid-19, Click Here.
C) Create a Local Content
- Blogging is must be needed for Local SEO.
- If you are not posting blogs on a website, then please start as soon as possible.
- Through blogs, you can acquire good backlinks, which is one of the most important factors to improve your Local SEO ranking.
- Now you need to focus on adding local keywords, business location names to your blog.
- Adding local keywords in your blog not only increase your ranking, but also helps your blog visitors to know about your business, & its locations.
- Some of the topics you can use in your blogs:
- Interviewing other related business owners within your city.
- By sponsoring local events.
- Provide information about local events happening in your city.
D) Optimize for Voice Search SEO
- You heard this term “Voice Search” right? Even maybe you also used this.
- Now many users don’t type the words in Google, They just speak and google will show them the best results.
- Most users use “Voice Search” when wanting a specific thing, So you need to optimize your website according to that.
- Here you can also use schema, so google will understand your website and its elements such as your hours, your services/products, & everything related to your business.
E) Use Local Keywords
- You should use those keywords in your website that your specific regional-based audience searched. For that, you can many tools like “Keyword Planner“, “Semrush“, “Ahref“, “Ubersuggest” etc.
- These tools will help you find the right keywords that your targeted regional-based audience searched on SERP.
- Once you get the keywords list, after that you just need to optimize your content strategy.
F) Use Location-Specific Landing Page
- Location-specific pages help you rank faster in SERP.
- You can use location-specific pages when your business has more than one location.
- If you have only one location, then we would suggest optimizing your about-us page as your business landing page.
- Few things should be on your landing page such as business hours, contact number, testimonials, specific offers (If you have), Unique descriptions, & Google Maps (Additionally).
G) Use Local Directories
- Submitting your website in popular local directories like yell, good firms, Trustpilot, clutch, will not just help you get quality traffic and backlinks, but it also helps you to improve your Local SEO.
- You just need to include the correct information, so people can easily redirect to your website or connect with you on a call.
- One of the most popular local directories “Yell.com” has more than 8M users with an average of 2M+ visit duration & under 55% bounce rate. (Source: Similarweb)
H) Focus on Local Link Building
- We all know that link building is one of the most important factors that Google considers for search ranking.
- So, more quality backlinks mean a higher chance to be top of the page on a particular query.
- Few tips to generate high-quality backlinks
- Create skyscraper content that others want to link on their website
- By submitting your content to another third-party website (Guest Blogging), created a higher chance to get quality traffic & backlinks
- You can also use some advanced level link building techniques such as HARO, Broken Link Building & Outreach marketing.
- For more detailed information on how to create a strong backlink profile for your website, you can read the recently published blog Here.
I) Dedicated Pages for Each Product/Services
- To improve your local SEO, you need to create a more specific page for your product/services.
- You cannot target so many local keywords on a single page.
- Just imagine, you have 6 products, & you showed them on a single page, now how many keywords you used on a single page? Not more than 4 we guess. So, it might be possible you are only ranking for 1 or 2 product local keywords.
Conclusion
Hope you will get the idea of how local SEO is helpful. Right now, every business owner is looking for big pictures, but they do not focus on smaller things. So, we would suggest going first for local SEO, & then you can go with country-based SEO services. if you don’t have the bandwidth to optimize your website for local SEO, you can hire local SEO agencies.
