With expansion in online marketing, local businesses were the first to take a hit. They were the ones that lost major market share, but as the time has passed, people are gravitating back to it. Today more and more people are indulging in a local business for buying products and services. Hence, if you are a local business owner, expanding it is the need of the hour. For this purpose, we use local SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Optimizing local SEO means targeting those audiences who are present in nearby locations of your offline store, getting relevant website traffic, leads, and conversions. Approaching the right SEO strategy is an effective way to compete with national brands having abundant resources. You can improve SEO and local ranking by focusing specifically on local search optimization. Also, if you are facing trouble in running the local SEO campaign, you will be losing much relevant traffic for your website. By reading this blog, you will get an idea of local SEO, how it works and what methods you can accomplish that yields a successful result.
What is local SEO?
Local SEO is a practice performed to increase the search visibility of such businesses that are locally available and serve their neighborhoods face-to-face. Suppose, if you are running a local business like a shop, doctor's office, service area, restaurant, etc., then I guess your main goal is to target local audiences. Your web pages should rank for queries that are being searched by local users.
Optimizing Google local SEO means you are assuring the visitors that you are available both online and offline. So, when you are available on both platforms, even if the customers are not arriving at your business area, you are still targeting the audiences living in your neighborhood. Hence, optimization of your online presence for that area is a vital task.
So, local SEO encompasses assuring that a business's location shows up in the local search on Google. It also includes managing rich snippets (like customer's reviews and ratings). Social media marketing is a great approach to target local audiences through social media platforms.
Why local SEO is important?
Local SEO plays an important role in the marketing of a business. It helps in the growth of your brand awareness, to increase its visibility, in connecting with the local users, and in earning a better reputation for your business in your area. Below are few reasons why it is so essential.
• To compete with the competitors
Well, there is no point in being innovative and best in what you are doing if no one can find you. Tons of other companies are available online selling their business. Suppose you run a restaurant, and serve the best food in your locality; will the customers come if they don't know about your place? No! They will search the restaurant online and pick from the results that appear on the first page. Similarly, if you are not ranking on the initial page of SERPs, then the users won't know about your place, and they won't choose you.
Hence, to improve the CTR (click-through rate) of your website, you need to spend on your Google local SEO so that you can improve SEO and your local ranking to compete with your competitors.
• To engage local buyers
Nowadays, customers lean towards mega-companies, but not every user wants to shop that way. People are also interested in supporting the local businesses. If you run an SEO campaign for local search optimization, you will find out there are many customers to help your business. There are many users that are converting from big-box stores to local shops. They want to contribute their time and money where it can make a difference.
Hence, you need to develop a strategy to improve SEO and embrace your local stores. Therefore, establishing your business locally, you will notice that there are many customers to lift your business.
• Mobile searches incorporate sales
Suppose you are walking down the road, and suddenly you wanted to eat a pastry. What will you do? If you are like most people, you will take your phone and search for the nearest available store to fulfill your needs. Similarly, when your local ranking and
Hence, to mobile-first indexing is good, people will pick your place to accomplish their desire. It will also increase the conversion rate on the mobile website.
Not only this, when a user searches for the local stores, then sometimes Google shows an appropriate store that is distant from the person's location . So, if you have a strong presence of your business, Google will automatically pick you up and show the results on top of SERPs.
• It is inexpensive
As compared to pay-per-click, search engine optimization is an inexpensive way of marketing your business. If you are investing in improving local search optimization, be sure that it will give you a long-term result. With a good SEO, your website's local ranking will be affected positively. To maintain your top SEO rank, you need to incorporate various techniques in your SEO campaigns. SEO is mostly cheap when compared to PPC. You will have to spend the cost only if you hire an SEO company to improve your organic performance. Thus, it is cheaper than other marketing methods like PPC, where you need to pay an amount for every click.
How does local SEO works?
When you optimize for Google local SEO, your main objective is to tell Google that now your business is located in a particular area. All you want is to let customers know about your business as much as possible. Local search optimization becomes easier if you have a precise address in a region or a city. It helps the users to find your store through the store locator on the website. You can also create local landing pages that can assist them further more.
The most important thing at the time of the local search optimization is the use of the right Local Business Schema Markup. It assures Google that your business is available offline as well with a physical address, plus it also talks about the different regions where your store is accessible. But, if you want to achieve a top SEO rank, then optimizing your website is not enough. You need to conduct a thorough (Google My Business) GMB optimization as well and for that, you should consider adding add all the relevant information to your Google My Business account. In addition to that, you can create a robust social media marketing strategy for your business to aware and target a large number of local audiences at the same time. Also, take special care of the product description or the content on page. Take the help of a content specialist to write the proper illustration of your product and create great content to describe your store. The best thing is to hire an SEO company for content marketing. They have well-skilled writers that can create creative content for your product or service pages.
Ways to improve local SEO
So far, you may have gotten an idea of what Google local SEO is and why it is so important; but what if it doesn't work? So, to make your Google local SEO successful, you can create an SEO strategy using the given ways:
• Create Google My Business account
To carry out GMB optimization, you need to create an account on Google My Business associated with the profile that you wish to rank. Once all the required information is filled on the Google My Business account, all the particulars will be added to your business profile and will be displayed in the Google search local results, the Google Search Knowledge Panel, and Google Maps.
If you want to optimize your business profile on Google, please consider these given points:
1. Build a Google My Business account and verify the business' ownership.
2. Give updated, correct, and relevant information.
3. Using Google My Business dashboards, announce products, special offers, and events through post to your business profile.
4. Encourage your customers to give a review.
5. Give a good response to the customer’s review.
6. Include different data like logo, acceptable payment methods, opening and closing time, service or products sold by you, abundant images, etc.
• Voice search optimization
These days people are taking the help of voice search more than typing directly in the Google search bar. So, for the Google local SEO, your business should show up for voice search i.e., when they speak into devices. On that account, you also need to upgrade your profile. You need to make sure that your business profile is able to respond to the traditional question starters like who, what, when, where, why, and how. The users' intention is also crucial to consider. It is beneficial to the customers if they are looking for a response to a specific question. For example, if a user is searching opening timing of your business, then he expects that only. Hence, showing up proper and relevant information would be preferable.
• Try to get regular reviews from happy customers
Getting a positive and glowing review from happy customers is always helpful to target audiences. It is the best way to encourage other users to visit your store, plus it will increase brand awareness. This SEO strategy is great for GMB optimization as well.
Below mentioned are a few ways that can help you to get customers' reviews:
1. Ask for review directly from the customers after the closure of a deal.
2. You can send an email or a text message after the completion of a purchase requesting your customers to add reviews (for that be sure that they are happy with your service or products because negative reviews will negate the whole hard work.)
3. Give a sincere response to the reviews. Thanks for a good review is no harm but be sure that you note down and work on non-favorable reviews.
According to Google asking customers for reviews is okay but don’t force too much or it will irritate them. It is not even good for GMB optimization.
• Optimize your website for mobile
It is a well-known fact that mobile users are increasing rapidly. More and more people are preferring mobile searches rather than a desktop search. So, taking a step to optimize the mobile website is for sure going to benefit you. In this case, you should create an SEO strategy so that you will be aware of what steps you can take to accomplish your goal. Getting the help of a digital marketing company for website development is also advisable.
Furthermore, there are some ways that you can follow:
1. Ensure that your website loading time is less than 10 sec. Visitors don’t like to wait; hence faster site load time will reduce the bounce rate.
2. Bigger and simpler fonts are easily readable so using them is always a good idea.
3. Image optimization is a vital task. Adding relevant and appropriate size images is always preferable by the users.
• Focus on local and relevant keywords
It is quite sensible that you should add relevant keywords for the local ranking of your business profile. You can conduct keyword research by applying geographical filters in the Google ads keyword planner tool as well as Google trends. Both the tools are an approachable way to create a list of local relevant keywords. After knowing what keywords, you need to target, you can add them to your site's URLs, meta description, and copy. You can create meta tags for your website as well. You can also incorporate mentions of region-specific landmarks into your content.
• Use location pages
If you are serving in many areas, then you must need location pages to provide the following information:
• Store hours
• Opening time and closing time of the store
• Name, address, and phone numbers
• Parking availability
• Offers or promotions if any
• Google maps attached to each of the location page
You need to take extra care if you are providing products and services to more than one location. In such a case, you need to create unique content for each page. But in case if you hold a store at only one location, then create an "About Us" page where you can add all the information required by the users to locate your store.
Final thoughts
Google algorithmic changes are so frequent now that you never know what can happen next, what new rule will be introduced by Google next morning. Still, being at the top of SERPs is any business' priority. Hence, in the above blog, you are provided some methods that can help you to improve local SEO. It plays an important role in the marketing business and increases brand awareness for local customers. You can improve SEO by running an SEO campaign where you create an SEO strategy to get more local customers that are interested in your products and services. Whether you are running a big or a small business, you can take the help of tools like Google search console to check your online presence. You can even outsource SEO services if you are facing trouble in running your SEO campaign.
Reference
What is local SEO & why local search is important
Top 10 ways to improve your local SEO right now