When you offer local services, you are rest assured of getting customers from your locality and nearby geographical regions, right? WRONG! Simply starting a physical store and offering local services does not guarantee that you will get local customers easily. Why do we say so?
First, according to proven market research, approximately 97% of customers go online to search for local services. Also, about 82% of consumers with smartphones look for local businesses and stores via a search engine, such as Google. Therefore, to ensure that you get more customers for your local business, you need to have an online presence. This is where local search engine optimization services come in.
So what exactly is local search engine optimization? And how would your business benefit from incorporating these services into its daily operations? In this comprehensive guide, we discuss everything you need to know about local SEO and your business. Read on!
What is Local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (local SEO) refers to the process of enhancing the visibility of local businesses on different search engines. In other words, it is the process of making a local brick-and-mortar company or business visible on search engines, especially for geographically-related searches.
Local SEO can be compared with the modern-day phone book. For example, while you may still your business in the Yellow Pages or through newspaper ads, the calls you receive from these tend to be fewer. On the contrary, local SEO improves the visibility of your business, such that your brick-and-mortar store generates more calls and contact forms.
To understand how local SEO works, thinks about this scenario: You are at work and decide to order some chicken for your lunch. When you Google “chicken inns,” you will find a list of chicken inns that are near your work location. However, when you go back home and search for “chicken inns” on Google, high chances are that you will find entirely different results. And this makes sense, considering that you need to have your food delivered by nearby chicken inns.
Local SEO works to make your physical store visible to customers. Search engines take your location and proximity into account. Therefore, when a customer searches for a query with a local keyword or intent, the search engine directs them to your store. This is so regardless of whether the customer included a city name in their query or search.
Therefore, when businesses follow all the best local SEO practices, they improve their overall organic traffic and attract more customers to their businesses, whether online or in brick-and-mortar stores. Simply put, when you work on your local SEO, you make your physical store more popular and prominent.
Importance of Local SEO Services
Take a moment to think about these two statistical analyses:
- Compared with previous years, God search queries that include the phrase “near me” have now increased by 150%.
- Among all the consumers who searched for products or services within their vicinity, 74% of these actually visited the physical store on that very same day.
These statistical analyses prove that the quality of your local SEO campaigns has a direct impact on the success and profitability level of your business. The more local SEO practices you apply, the more leads and sales you drive to your business.
Consider the following seven key benefits of incorporating local search engine optimization services in your business:
1. Increases Online Visibility
As mentioned at the onset of this article, approximately 97% of consumers search for local services online. Of this 97%, only 2% are willing to look for more search results on the second page or other pages; the majority of consumers only remain on the first page and choose the local services from among the top results.
Local SEO helps to improve the rankings of your web pages. When customers search for a service or product within your geographical area, your business will appear among the top search results. In turn, this will increase your online visibility to potential customers, such that you get more customers and drive more sales for your business.
2. Increases Leads and Traffic
If yours is a physical brick-and-mortar store, then you won’t benefit greatly from leads and traffic from customers in different states, cities, or countries. Instead, you want to attract local customers within your geographical area of business or neighborhood.
However, unless you utilize local SEO, you will find yourself competing too much for space in the search engines’ results with other competitors. And with such a high competition, chances of your business being passed over or getting unnoticed are quite high.
Local SEO works to make you visible to customers within your locality. And by helping you generate more traffic from your customers, you increase your visit-to-sale rate. Also, when you offer high-quality services and products to these customers, you can rest assured of getting more return customers for your business; customers who will also help to market your business and bring in more new customers.
3. Provides Targeted Geographic Campaigns
One of the things that consumers appreciate most about a business is high-quality customer support. Customers tend to stick to businesses that offer hyper-personalized online support. And local SEO provides you with just the perfect opportunity to target your geographic campaigns to localized groups or target audiences.
4. Provides a Competitive Advantage
If you want to stand out from other companies and businesses in a similar line of industry, you need to take advantage of local search engine optimization services. Market research shows that less than 50% of companies use these SEO services.
Therefore, when you take advantage of local SEO services, you stand out in local searches, directories, social media, and maps. In turn, this gives you a competitive advantage over other businesses.
5. Promotes a Higher Conversion Rate
When you create a localized SEO site for your business, you will share your contact details. For example, you could share your company’s email, phone number, physical address or social media account details.
Therefore, when customers search for a service online and come across your listing, they will have direct access to your contacts. And when they call, you will have converted an online search query into a real purchase! Hence, local SEO provides you with the opportunity to increase your visibility and in turn generate a higher conversion rate for your business.
6. Builds Links with Nearby Businesses
When you utilize local SEO, your website ranks high and you consistently show up on search engine queries, as well as on other sites. For example, say another local business within your locality wants to cross-promote their products or services. If your business is listed locally, it will be very easy for the company to find you.
Building links with other nearby businesses can give your company a push forward. For instance, you may get mentioned in the posts that the business makes. Besides, the better relationships you forget with other nearby businesses may also earn you referrals from the company’s customers.
7. Reduces Advertising Costs
There are plenty of ways to advertise your business. You could pay for newspaper ads, print brochures, and booklets or advertise on television, just to mention a few channels. However, while you could still make use of all those advertisement methods, no method beats the effectiveness of local SEO.
Local SEO ensures that you always rank high in search engine results, maps, and other navigational apps. This means that your target consumers will see your website and the products or services you offer. And since this is enough advertising, you won’t have to channel your money into other forms of advertising.
Tips for Improving Your Local SEO
Considering the many benefits that local SEO has to offer, all businesses should consider utilizing these services, especially brick-and-mortar. But how can you make the most out of local SEO services?
Here are nine effective tips that can help you improve the local SEO for your company:
1. Optimize for Google My Business
One outstanding aspect of Google My Business is that it provides content that can be supported and verified. This is why Google uses this tool to market businesses and make them visible to consumers.
Therefore, if you are looking to improve your local SEO, the first thing you should do is optimize for Google My Business. You can do this by:
- Creating and verifying a page on Google My Business
- Encouraging all your customers to post their reviews for your services online
- Make use of Google posts in your account.
- Specifying the company name and location when responding to reviews – For example, you can write something like, “Thank you for shopping at {full company name}, in {city, state}.
2. Add Your Company Name, Address, and Contact Details
Of course, you want your customers and clients to be able to find your business easily. And this is almost impossible if you do not include your address and contact details on your website. To ensure an effective local SEO, set up your NAP:
- N- Name
- A- Address
- P- Phone number (don’t forget to include your area code in the phone number)
When setting up your NAP, include it as crawlable HTML text on the website. Also, do not simply include your NAP within a photo or image. After all, it is almost impossible to crawl photos from search engines, such as the HTML text. On the contrary, always include your NAP on convenient site locations, like the header or footer of the website.
3. Optimize Citations and Online Directories
When you set up your website, you want to avoid any discrepancies, such as wrong abbreviations, misspellings, wrong contact details, or lack of suite number. Make sure that you provide clear and genuine information about your business.
If Google or other search engines find it quite difficult to determine which information or data is correct, they may rank your business very low in search results, or even fail to show it entirely. Also, you should delete any duplicate listings that you may have added to your business.
As for your citations, verify that these are consistent; do this regularly. If your company is located in the United States, you can use the four most common data aggregators to ensure that your citations are complete: Factual, Express Update, Foursquare, and Neustar Localeze.
4. Conduct a Local SEO Audit
You may set up the best SEO-optimized website for your business, and that is commendable. Even so, you need to remember that SEO is an ongoing process. Simply setting up an optimized site does not guarantee that you will enjoy increased visibility and traffic to your site; you need to work on your local SEO regularly and consistently.
Conducting a local SEO audit can help to ensure that your site remains optimized throughout. It involves conducting thorough research and examination of the different aspects that make up your site’s local search strategy.
To conduct an informative local SEO audit, break down the process into the following five activities:
- On-page audit – Does your website include all the elements of on-page SEO necessary for higher ranking?
- Google My Business Audit – Is the information included in your ‘Google My Business’ account accurate? How does your account appear in search engine results?
- Competitor analysis – How does your website compare with other sites of other companies in the same line of the industry as you? Does it match up, is it better than other sites, or are there aspects that you need to work on?
- Website Audit – How well does your business website perform?
- Google Search Console Audit – Can your website be described as being crawlable? Are there any errors in the site that could prevent indexing?
- Citation Audit – How accurate are your citations in top business directories?
Conducting these six different types of audits will provide a clear picture of where your website ranks, helping you realize what aspects you need to work on to create your ideal website.
5. Add Internal Links
External links help to boost the traffic to your site, increasing your overall conversion rate. However, internal links are more useful when it comes to boosting your SEO rankings. This is why you must adjust the structure of your internal links. Internal links provide the following key benefits for your business:
- They distribute ranking power and page authority evenly among the web pages.
- They support user-friendly and easy website navigation.
- They promote website hierarchy.
6. Add Location Pages to Your Site
Have you established your business in more than one physical location? If so, then you need to create location pages for all these brick-and-mortar stores. A location page contains information such as your company name, physical address of the store, store hours, company email, phone number, transit information, promotions, store descriptions, and testimonials from satisfied customers.
However, when adding location pages to your site, avoid creating duplicate content. For every single business, create an About Us page that describes the specific local business. Furthermore, you can add a Google Map pin on every location page to direct your customer to your physical brick-and-mortar store.
7. Create a Mobile-Friendly Website
Did you know that 61% of all searches made on Google are done on a mobile device? For example, consumers use their smartphones to find addresses and directions to your store, look up reviews left by other customers or search for your business’ contact information. Therefore, when you make your website mobile-friendly, you attract more customers to your business.
8. Make Use of Inbound Links
Also known as backlinks, inbound links play a key role in boosting your local SEO. These links tell Google and other search engines that yours is a legit company. In turn, these search engines rank you high in search results. Also, backlinks help to improve your relevance and domain authority.
There are three effective ways you can get inbound links for your website:
- Through scholarships
- Through guest blog posting
- Through partnerships and sponsorships
9. Optimize Your Blog Post Content
When writing articles for your blog, you need to remember that each new post represents a newly-indexed page for your website. It is a new page that focuses on specific search phrases. Therefore, you want to take advantage of this opportunity and use your blog posts to increase your visibility in SERPS (search engine results pages).
When you write an article, optimize the content for SEO. You can do this by using the right keywords throughout the article, in the title tag, the meta description, and the headers. Also, if you find it quite hard to create geo-targeted content for your blog, you can opt to feature different case studies and customer success stories on your website.
Should You Hire a Local SEO Company?
What do you think, does your business really need to hire a local SEO company? Or could you just perform the local search engine optimization services all by yourself? Well, while you could still conduct a local SEO audit and analysis yourself, it is always recommended that you hire an SEO company to do it for you.
As a business person, you have a lot on your shoulders; you manage the daily operations of the business, deal with employee issues, try to solve any problems that arise at work, and even try to make time for your loved ones. With so much to do, you may not find enough time to focus on your business’s local SEO and conduct a thorough analysis.
Also, note that search engines are constantly updating the ranking factors that they use for their local search. Yet, keeping up with all these updates may prove quite challenging for you. And when you don’t keep up with these updates, you fall behind the competition.
This is why you should consider hiring a local SEO company to perform these services for you. These companies have just the right professionals; experts who can help your website get more leads, and traffic and generate more sales. Besides local SEO companies have enough knowledge and expertise on how to use the best local SEO tools to give your website that competitive edge and a higher conversion rate.
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Which Businesses Should Hire a Local SEO Company?
All businesses can benefit greatly from hiring a local SEO company; both online and brick-and-mortar stores. However, particular lines of field are highly recommended to hire the services of a local SEO company more than others. Consider the following business conditions which would require you to hire a local SEO company:
- If your business serves a particular geographical area (or has a physical brick-and-mortar location).
- If you intend to increase leads and traffic to your website or generate more sales within DMAs (designated market areas).
- If your company serves specific geographic areas, such as towns, neighborhoods, and cities.
- If you have established stores in more than one town or designated market areas (DMAs); however, you do not provide your services or sell products Nationwide.
- If you manage a firm whose main source of income or revenue is from local customers.
- If you intend your physical business to appear in Google’s local pack, maps, or navigation applications.
- If you have specialized as a franchisee or a franchisor.
- If you are looking to add your business listings to Google My Business, BBB (Better Business Bureau), and other online directories.
Conclusion
All businesses have one sole purpose; to make a profit. However, to make a significant profit for your business, you need to generate more customers and more sales. If your business is a brick-and-mortar store, the best way you can attract more customers and a higher conversion rate are by utilizing local search engine optimization services.
Local SEO helps to increase the visibility of your business to consumers, generates more leads, and gives you a competitive advantage in the market. And the good news is, that it is an affordable strategy that adds a tremendous value to your company. So if you are looking to maximize your business profits, consult with a local SEO company today and let them help you formulate a strategy that will increase your overall traffic and generate leads like never before!