Local SEO is the most important part of your business if you provide services in a specific geographic location i.e., if you’ve an offline office or a place to serve your audience. It can attract a great load of traffic to your website and more conversions than you’ve witnessed before.
Local SEO is about optimizing your website, the content that you post and all the Internal and external links that you’ve on your website. It helps in ranking well on Local Search Engines Results Pages.
Local searches are great for you if you’re looking to target an audience that not only engages but converts as well. People search for local businesses when they’re looking to purchase something i.e., when they have a purchase intent. Approximately 80 percent of people do local searches through their mobile phones and 50 percent of people visit offline stores. This shows how much benefit your business will gain through performing Local SEO.
Why Is Local SEO Important
Local SEO serves the best results. There’s less competition locally if compared to global searches. It’s easier to rank in local search. With the rankings, you attract traffic, incorrect words, and “quality traffic”. Quality traffic refers to the audience who has an intention to convert and reach out to you for your service.
Other than that, people usually have a habit of searching for things online before actually visiting offline places. They randomly search the place name with a near me tag, see reviews and ratings, and boom, they are there.
So, you know, you get better ranks, better traffic as well as better reach through local SEO than regular SEO.
Google My Business Profile
The very first step towards local SEO you can take is to create a Google My Business profile. If you are aware of it, Google’s dominance is over 92 percent (mobile phone) in the search engine market share.
Google My Profile is a free service provided by Google to appear in local searches and shows your business on Google Maps where you’re able to display photos of your geographic store and attract potential customers.
To set up a great Google My Business profile, make sure that –
You have your correct and same business name, address and phone number distributed among the directories and online listings you provided your business information. This helps in knowing that your business is real and trustable.
Select between three to five categories in which you provide service to your customers and that match your business. This helps in reaching all the potential customers and covering all the parts you provide service for.
Include a 100-200 word description about your business. It should be able to explain all the important things about your business which is both compelling and informative.
Keywords and Content
How are you going to show up on searches? Through keywords. Keywords are the words that users put in the search boxes to find things they need or want to learn more about. Here, what you have to do is to find those keywords and optimize your content and profile for them. It’s a simple but powerful step towards ranking in Local searches.
You have to list down all the keywords and phrases that you think your user uses to search for gs that are related to you and the services you provide. To make this approach more targeted, use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush or Ahrefs. These tools provide you with more Keywords that you might not have thought of.
You’ll also be able to find information about them like, the competition level, search volume, monthly traffic etc. Target keywords that have good monthly traffic but a low competition level.
Include these keywords in the content you provide. Also, focus on providing valuable and informational content. It boosts your rank, traffic and converts as well. To make it more effective, focus on –
- Using targeted keywords in the titles, headings, description and body.
- Create content that is easy to understand and utilize. Make it for humans and not robots.
- Interlink-related content to provide more information on specific topics.
Share the content that you create through emails, to your friends, family, audience, siblings and anyone that you think can benefit from it.
Citations, Links and Reviews.
When the NAP details about your business are added to different directories and online listings, it’s called Citation. It improves the level of trust of your audience. To be more approachable to easy to find, focus on linking with other profiles. Perform interlinking and backlinking to drive more traffic to your website and keep them engaged with what you provide.
Another step to improve trust is to gain reviews from your audiences. Reach out to your satisfied audience and ask them to leave a review. People believe in the words of people and make sure to benefit from this. You can show it off online and gain more potential customers.
Track Your Performance
Why put effort if you don’t want to see the results? Similarly, why would you do all this if you don’t want to know where you stand? To track all of it and grow, keep monitoring and analyzing your profile regularly.
Use online tools like Google Search Console or other tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to gain
- Insights about your content
- Status of your website
- Rankings
- Traffic on your website
- and other useful metrics.
The local search engine is for all those who have an offline place for the services they provide. It’s easier to rank, gain more traffic and convert. So don’t delay and start working on it!
