Are you a small business owner looking to expand your reach, attract extra customers, and ultimately increase your income? If so, local SEO may be the key to solving this potential.
Native SEO, or search engine optimization, is a targeted approach to educating your business’s visibility in search results, specifically directing to customers in your area. With most consumers searching for local services online, it’s more important than ever to make sure your business stands out from the competition.
Imagine your business appearing at the highest of hunt results, attracting a steady stream of customers actively searching for your services. By harnessing the power of local SEO, you can drive more traffic, build a strong reputation within your community, and develop long-lasting relationships and loyal customers.
Read on to find out why local SEO is important for your business.
What is local SEO?
Local SEO works to optimize a business’s online presence to improve its visibility in hunt results for location-specific queries. This involves directing users in a specific physical area by applying various strategies, such as optimizing local keywords, managing Google business profile schedules, and nurturing customer reviews to attract local customers and direct traffic to physical locations.
What Are the Benefits Of Local Seo?
As a local business owner, you may think there’s no point in investing time and money into optimizing your Google presence when you’re up against companies like Walmart and Amazon for top rankings. This may be true for top organic listings, but it is not true for local search.
Whether you have a physical brick-and-mortar location or help a particular geographic area, local SEO allows you to better connect with the people in your neighborhood, town, or city. This is important given that 81% of consumers now turn to Google to review local businesses.
Benefits of Local Seo
- Better online visibility: Local SEO activities such as citations and link building increase your online visibility. This makes your business more easily visible to new customers.
- More in-store foot traffic: Greater local visibility drives more foot traffic to your physical location.
- Take advantage of the rise of local shopping: Post-COVID, more than half of customers now prefer to shop locally and support local trades or small brands. Local SEO puts you at the forefront of these new commercial openings.
- Targeted Web Traffic – Optimizing your place for local search drives more targeted traffic to your website, which can lead to more leads, signups, signups, and sales.
- More calls: Optimizing your Google Commercial Profile (formerly Google My Business) can lead to better visibility on Google Maps. This can result in more calls besides more in-person visits.
- Thought leadership: Content marketing can help you start a thought leadership position and be seen as an expert in your field.
The Five Advantages of Local Seo
1. Better Online Visibility
Many activities associated with local SEO will not only help you recover your perceptibility in local search results but will likewise help you create better overall visibility online.
Creating citations, for example, is an essential part of local SEO activity. This involves creating mentions of your business name, physical talk (ideally including zip code), and phone number across directory listings, social media profiles, and connected review platforms.
Because you’ll be doing this in as many different locations as possible, it will be easier for the right people (those interested in your specific creation or service in their area) to find your business at the right time (when they’re active with you). Are you looking for a company like yours? If you operate a B&B in upstate New York, for example, a TripAdvisor NAP might help attentive visitors find you and make a reservation.
2. More Foot Traffic in The Store
Greater local visibility can help increase foot traffic to your physical location, whether it’s a coffee shop, dry cleaner, or hardware store. If you’ve invested heavily in specialized equipment, designed an innovative space, or have a brick-and-mortar location since your products are best experienced in person, increasing the number of people visiting can help you generate excitement in your space. And make more sales.
3. Take Advantage of The Local Shopping Boom
In recent years, there have been considerable changes in consumer purchasing habits. One of the most prominent is that today’s consumers progressively order from local businesses when making purchasing decisions.
Research shows that consumers think small and choose to prioritize small, local, autonomous businesses over larger branded offerings or experiences they have previously chosen.
56% of consumers say they deliberately trust local stores and actively seek out nearby sourced products.
76% of consumers also say they plan to shop more locally in the next 12 months, meaning there is an opportunity for independent small businesses to increase their sales. One of the main benefits of local SEO is that it connects you with local consumers precisely when they need your products or services. As a result, this can allow you to make the most of this change in buyer conduct to raise your business.
4. Targeted Web Traffic
As a small business, every miniature you spend commerce with definite leads or people who are unlikely to make a purchase or book a service is wasted money.
Local SEO can help eliminate unconnected traffic and eliminate time wasters that stop your business from operating efficiently, helping to safeguard your business from being only noticeable to search users in your area.
Given that 59% of search users turn to Google to research a purchase they are considering making in-store, this can be a significant advantage, allowing you to focus your resources on the customers most likely to change.
5. More Calls Besides Visits From Maps Users
Enhancing your Google Business Profile can lead to better visibility on Google Maps. This, in go, can lead to more calls and in-person visits, as Google Maps was exactly designed to help users find local services and plan their trips.
Google Maps works with information that Google obtains from business profiles. Therefore, any optimization of your Google Business Profile you make will directly contribute to your visibility on Maps, increasing your number of calls and in-person visits.
How to Optimize Your Local Business Listings
Optimizing your local business listings is vital to any successful local SEO strategy. You can improve your online visibility and appeal to more local customers by guaranteeing your business information is accurate, consistent, and easy to find across different stages. Twitch by optimizing your Google business profile listing, your Yelp business listing, and any social media profiles you actively manage.
In this step-by-step tutorial, I’ll walk you through optimizing your local business listings, covering everything from naming your business to getting local customer reviews.
Here’s how to optimize your local business listings:
- Optimize your business name: Make sure your business name is consistent across all ads and accurately reflects your brand. Avoid overusing keywords or adding unnecessary information that search engines may consider spam.
- Update your business address: If your business has a physical location, make sure your business address is correct and formatted consistently across all platforms. Include suite or building numbers, if applicable.
- Define your service area: For service providers without a physical address, define your service area in your listings. This helps potential clients know if your services are available in their area.
- Update Business Hours – Provide accurate, up-to-date business hours on all programs to avoid customer confusion and missed opportunities.
- Optimize business categories: Select the most applicable and specific categories for your business, as they can affect your visibility in local search results. Be thorough, but avoid overloading with irrelevant categories.
By following these steps, you can optimize your local business programs and recover your online presence, making it calmer for local customers to find and select your business over your competitors.
