Are you a small business owner running your services within a particular locality? Then you have got to use local SEO to help you reach the right customers. It makes no sense for a burger joint in New York to show its ads and website to someone searching for burgers from India.
People are more likely to buy from stores near them or order from local stores for quick service and delivery. Statistics say that around 95% of mobile users carry out local searches to find what they want. About 59% of those who perform local searches do end up visiting stores from the search results. There are many more stats that support the benefits of ranking higher in local searches. They all point towards one direction – local searches are good for local businesses, especially when you have a physical store in the locality.
Now read on more to find out how local SEO from the best digital marketing agency can impact your overall search rankings and how you can make good use of them.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO is similar to normal SEO except that it is highly specialized towards the geographical region or locality from which the search operation is performed. For instance, the query “best restaurant” will give different results for different cities. This is because users try to interact more with businesses closer to them, and search engines help them find the nearby businesses first.
So any SEO practice or effort that helps improve the site’s local search engine ranking is called local SEO. It can include anything from a Google Business listing, reviews, online ratings, social media pages, and more. According to the best Google Ads agencies, the four main elements that impact the local SEO are:
Google My Business
Google My Business is a free service that lets you list your business with all relevant details like company name, description, address, and contact details. You can better optimize your Google My Business listing by claiming your listing and get its owner verified. If you don’t find your listing, you will have to create one for yourself.
When people search for similar services or businesses, having a good business listing will help you come up on top of search engine results.
Here are some more ways to boost your Google My Business profile:
- You can ask your existing customers and new customers to leave reviews on your business profile. High numbers of reviews show you as a trustable business, and Google will recognize this and boost your ranking in local searches.
- You can add photos of your business place or product catalog to your listing. Adding images will improve your click rates and thus improve your SEO as well.
- You need to add proper details like address, contact information, operating hours, and description of your business to the listing. The more detailed information you provide, the better the results will be.
- Provide the proper category of your business area.
- Check your Google business listing for any errors and keep it up to date. Make sure the Google Maps address it links to is indeed directing the actual store.
Keywords
Keywords are an essential part of local SEO, just as they are to normal SEO. When optimizing for local SEO, you need to focus on long-tail keywords that mention the locality or region. For instance, use keywords like ‘mobile repairs in New York.’
Short keywords are too generic and can be expensive as well. On the other hand, long-tail keywords are better at drawing out the right target audience and cost way lesser. Do your keyword research and optimize your content on the selected keywords.
You should be using your selected keywords in all the right places like meta descriptions, title tags, headings, and other content.
Content and Links
Localized content and local links are considered to be crucial towards improving local SEO. So you need to ensure you have specialized local landing pages if you are a multiple location business or a franchise.
Good quality backlinks are a great way to improve your SEO rankings. Make use of both inbound and outbound links to add to your credibility. You can collaborate with relevant publications and news sites within your industry for making guest posts and mentions about your business and get them linked to your site. You can reach out to magazines, news sites, bloggers, and reviewers and get them to try out your products and write about your business.
You should also look into any site that has mentioned your name but has not provided a link. In such cases, you can request them to provide a link back to your site. This can be done by using the Google Alerts service, which will track and keep you informed of any mentions about your business.
User Experience
While all the other factors try to bring a customer to your site or let them find you, it is the user experience that lets them stay and do actual business with you. And when more customers have a positive experience with your business, that will positively reflect on your search engine rankings as well.
Google uses factors like click-through rates, pages per session, bounce rate, call to actions, engagements , page speed, site responsiveness, content organization, and other user experience factors to assess the quality of your site and factor it into the ranking algorithm.
Focusing on these areas and ensuring that your customers have a good user experience will positively impact your ranking.
Local searches are also heavily dependent on mobile search results as most people use mobile devices to do such searches nowadays. So, make sure your site is mobile-friendly. To learn more on how local SEO can help you, speak to professionals from our digital marketing agency today.
