Nowadays, customers across the globe are using the internet to find information about effective local services and/or products as fast as possible. With this in mind in relation to your own business, you need to think about whether your company be showing up online when prospective customers are looking for services/products that you are offering.
When you hear the phrase “local SEO” you may just be getting a mental image of local, independent business — from services such as cafes and hairdressers to plumbers and mechanics. However, local SEO as a concept is something that all businesses can benefit from. Whether you are an independent business, a nationwide company with many satellite offices, or a company with outlets in various locations across the world, local SEO and utilising “near me” searches can help your business by finding local customers who are in need of your products or services.
What Is Local SEO?
Utilising effective SEO practices in your marketing strategies in order to boost your ranking in search engines is an absolute must for any business in today’s digital landscape. Any company not thinking about search engine result pages and how your company sits in mobile searches and desktop searchers as a way to connect with potential customers are missing one of the most crucial elements of modern business practices.
Local SEO can also be incredibly integral to building a successful and sustainable business. By taking time to invest in local SEO, you will be massively increasing the number of local customers that your business can connect with. While this can be especially vital practice for building a small business, it can also be used to massive effect as a large-scale business.
At its core, local SEO enables you to market your business to a local audience online. Increasing your business’s ranking in Google’s “Local Pack” in terms of the particular service that you are offering will mean that local customers are able to find your business quickly, effectively, and ahead of your competitors.
The Importance Of Local SEO?
Some of the most important benefits of implementing local SEO in your business’s growth include the following:
- Local SEO helps improve online visibility.
- Greater local online visibility increases your business’s foot traffic, leading to more satisfied customers and more sales.
- Optimising your webpage with local SEO in mind provides your webpage with more targeted traffic and increased traffic for relevant search terms.
- Using Google My Business can mean that you reap benefits from better visibility on Google Maps.
- Content marketing and thinking smartly about building links will improve your relevance.
- Reputation management improves the trust and good faith that people have in your business as well as your prominence in the eyes of Google’s algorithms — leading to increased traffic and sales.
Before we go deeper into the specifics of how to implement local SEO practices, let’s have a look at how Google’s algorithms work.
How Does Google Work?
When you open Google and type in a search phrase, Google then checks the patterns of an array of website signals, in tandem with ranking factors, including how relevant your website is in order to find a list of websites that best match your search phrase. It is important to remember that each time you search for something through Google, Google is not doing a fresh live search. Rather, it is looking through the stored index of all sites that Google has discovered — this is called the Google Index.
In order to build this index up, Google utilises tiny programmes termed “spiders” which are used to crawl through the web’s various pages. The “spiders” will begin on a single webpage, then it will follow the links that are on that webpage, scan the content on the linked pages, and so forth. Google’s “Spiders” can operate at a mind-bending pace, allowing Google’s Index to stay constantly up-to-date.
Google then ranks the web’s pages in a specific manner, primarily using a series of algorithms. Google’s algorithms will search the index for related content whenever you type in a search phrase. The results that the algorithm finds will be ranked in order of relevance, prominence, and popularity given by inbound links. Additionally, the algorithms will take into consideration on-site and off-site factors to find you the best content you need to help with your query.
In turn, this means that increasing your SEO improves your website’s relevance, prominence, and ultimately link popularity factors.
What Matters For Local SEO?
With a better understanding of the basics of Google’s ranking system as well as basic SEO practices, you will be able to look at specific practices which will help you stand out from the crowd in your local search rankings.
Local SEO improvements are most often done through something called “Online business citation.” An online business citation is, essentially, an online reference to your company name, your website’s physical address, or your company’s phone number (all together this data is termed your “NAP,” which stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number). Building citations on online directories (Yelp, for instance), social media sites (eg. Facebook), and even on Google itself will add citations to your business. Citations are one of the most important factors when it comes to social media ranking in terms of local SEO.
Due to the importance of your business’s NAP, you should make sure that your NAP is unified across all platforms, socials, and web pages. You should also not underestimate the importance of on-site SEO factors that will still be integral to your page’s growth. Thinking about using keywords effectively, title tag usage, how your URL is optimised, carefully considering your landing page content, and your local links.
How To Setup Local SEO
If you feel as though your business is ready to reap the benefits of local SEO practices, then Maxweb Solutions will be able to help you to achieve this goal. We are able to advise and work with your business so that you stand out from the online crowd, with a view to increasing your business’s platform, traffic, and revenue.
Posted on Friday, January 21st, 2022 in SEO.
