Do you run a local business? Well, we have good news for you! You can benefit largely with the help of local SEO. No, we’re not kidding! Let’s discuss this in detail.
Local SEO has emerged as an essential component of a local business’ marketing strategy in this internet era. It can provide your product or brand with an altogether unique brand presence when incorporated perfectly. This is perhaps because local SEO zooms in on certain demographical areas and commercial activities with precise keywords. Simply put, it is much easier to rank for a keyword targeted at your city, than to achieve good ranking on the same keyword but targeted nationally or internationally. For instance, the keyword ‘plumbers in Chicago’ is expected to provide you quick rankings when compared to ‘plumbers in USA’. You’re getting the drift, right?
But, how does this actually happens? Well, this is because local SEO focus on the area of business service which improves your rankings and provides you minimum competition. Local SEO assists in customizing your social media engagement and profiles towards a localized audience compared to a generic viewer. A car dealer in Buffalo, New York would not desire to market out to nationwide car purchasers. Isn’t it?
The Advantages of Local SEO
The prospect consumers prefer an organisation that connects with them on an individual level. They are not purchasing a brand or item but in fact buying the sociable, professional skill of local businesses which suit their requirements. Thus, building SEO campaign with keywords plus content that are local would make you retain customers with strongest links.
Even when clients look for a related keyword without location, the local optimization ensures that the nearby local pages are displayed higher up in the results than it would have otherwise. Local SEO makes use of various strategies to rank a site such as Google & Google My Business Listing, the Bing portal & Bing Places for Business and localized content on the portal. With that being said, there are a few businesses types that are expected to rank better than others in local SEO. This is important to know, as this will further boost your confidence and would give you a reason to invest in local SEO.
Let’s have a quick look.
Businesses Types That Reap Maximum Benefits in Local SEO
Medical Services
Healthcare providers require a noticeable search engine presence. Before selecting any medical facility, potential patients initially browse online to find a medical service that suits their requirements. Local SEO helps the medical service providers to connect with their patient needing such services online. The medical service providers, just by keeping their website SEO optimized, can provide an informative experience to their future patients when they search their website.
As medical services are of a highly-specialized type, adding blog posts or manuals and guiding people on how to do certain things would provide informative content to the user and upgrade the rankings of the business in Google search in return.
Plumbers
Looking for a plumber is often an emergency situation. Once you start typing ‘plumber’ in the Google search bar, the suggestion similar to keyword ‘plumber near me’ or ‘plumber (area name)’ appears. Plumbers can use this to their advantage and make use of Local SEO with a quick call to action.
This is sure to result in a constant visitor stream on to their contact pages. Creating blogs with educational details on plumbing facilities and solutions would not only be beneficial for the users but would also boost your reputation and signal the search engines about your credibility. Further, online customer reviews also have a huge influence on the local search engine rankings, and so, plumbers should motivate their clients to provide a feedback and review for them online.
Real Estate
The real estate agents need a suitable search exposure to help their business. If a real estate agency desires to rank on the search platform for a keyword such as homes for sale, they may not get the intended result. However, they can fetch the desired outcomes by making use of local SEO. It is highly recommended that the real estate business owners should create pages that target specific local markets and involve long-tail keywords. Quality content also goes a long way in creating value for the buyer when they search to purchase a property. Client reviews, utilizing local citations, inputting metadata and publishing quality content are important for the real estate agents to push traffic and gain leads. As a marketer, you should choose a portal that provides indexable listings and hosts XML sitemap in order to optimize your property listings in accordance with SEO.
Law Offices
People facing legal issues generally look for experts situated nearby and for this reason, it is imperative for legal firms to remain high on visibility in local searches. A law firm should create a Google my business page to promote its local listing. Further, it is highly recommended to make use of relevant keywords like a criminal lawyer or divorce attorneys to fetch better search results. A great advantage of local SEO for the legal firms is basically that Google displays a “Call” button clearly on mobile phones, thus driving leads directly to you!
Restaurants & Bars
Local search results for restaurants reveal many other data segments than simply call buttons or directions. They display images from the ‘Google Maps listing’ of the restaurants, their star rankings and special food category, the review numbers and the opening and closing time schedules based on the hour of the day you browse. Local SEOs help this market to target particular area geographically. Typing restaurant into ‘Google Search’ displays top ranked restaurants nearby to your location. This is the reason why restaurants and bars should make use of local SEO to boost their revenues.
Local SEO Tips To Follow
Optimize your business with respect to SEO
Following small business SEO tips like creating profiles of businesses on portals like ‘Bing Local’ and ‘Yelp’ can give a special recognition to your business. It is highly recommended to create a company page on LinkedIn and a YouTube channel and present instructional videos. Keeping the titles plus headers and meta description tags systematically assist Google in deciding the relevant search terms for pages all over your website.
Generate backlinks
Building backlinks or hyperlinks to your portal from different sites provide an upward search ranking and is a sensible SEO strategy. While making profiles on various sites, make it a point to list the business details in the same manner as is mentioned in ‘Google My Business’. You should create your business profile on review sites like AngelList and TripAdvisor which should match similarly to the one on ‘Google My Business’. Mentioning of city and state by businesses in blogs and articles establish a relevance of a business to the concerned city in fetching better rankings in local search results.
Have a mobile friendly website
A mobile-friendly site provides an enriching user experience and further helps you in reaping bonus points from Google due to enhanced UX.
Make use of SEO tools
Make use of various tools like Google Analytics to track the manner in which keywords divert traffic to the website.
The SEO tools aid in automatic analytics monitoring, search engine ratings, backlinks and key components that upgrade website performance. Small businesses can improve their SEO through the SEO tools that have the capacity to judge the content performance based on ‘Shares’ on different social media platforms and view how their portals perform against their rivals.
Your Turn
Thus, it can be said that Local SEO grants greater exposure to companies, and is economical and convenient to manage, thus producing improved results than nationwide SEO. It also allows a firm to delve into a concentrated marketing campaigns. The enterprises can taper down their target market and can serve their clients more effectively and track responses exactly.
