SEO has come a long way since the beginning when keyword stuffing was your quickest strategy to seeing results in the search engines.
Now for the best rankings in national and local SEO, you have to optimize your content wisely. Stuffing keywords and building spammy backlinks is no longer going to work if you want to be successful in the search engines.
Continue reading to learn what local SEO is, how it can help your business, and how to get started.
Keeping It Simple
Local SEO is the practice of optimizing your content to show up in the search engines when someone types in a local search.
An example of a local search is: “best lawyer in San Diego” or “find a plumber near me.”
Either one of these searches is going to pull up results for a local provider. This is unlike when someone does a general search looking for information. These results will pull up information that comes from across the country, and even the world.
Why It’s Important for Your Business
If you’re running ads on Google, Bing, and other search engines, or if you’re getting traffic from social media, you might not be sure local SEO is a must for your company. While having success through other channels is a positive, you shouldn’t ignore local SEO.
Learning how to market on Instagram and other platforms can bring in some local traffic, but nothing like local SEO will bring in, and here’s what we mean.
Brings More People To Your Physical Location
50% of people doing local searches on their phones went into the physical store within a day of that search.
Getting people in-store can be a challenge because of online shopping. That isn’t always because people don’t want to come into a store. Sometimes it is because people can’t find what they need locally.
Focusing on local search and making sure you show up can help you bring in sales that might have turned into online orders otherwise.
Builds Trust in the Marketplace
When people search for services or products in your industry, and your business shows up in the local search results, that builds trust. People trust Google, and other search engines, so when you show up at the top of the results, it gives you a boost.
Builds Awareness
If your business doesn’t show up in the local search results, people might not know that your business exists. Businesses without websites are nearly invisible, but now you also need to show up on the first page of Google, and other search engines to get attention.
How to Show Up in the Local Search Results
Now that you know some of the reasons you want to show up in the local search results, we’re going to give you some tips on how to show up. Following these steps will give you a good foundation.
Keyword Research
Understanding the keywords people are using to search for your products and services is important.
Researching keywords will allow you to figure out what people want to learn, what people want to buy, and more. Not only will you learn these things from keyword research, but you’ll be able to see which keywords are the least high competition.
A simple change in the target keyword search could mean that you rank in 3 months instead of having to wait 6 months to rank. When you’re researching keywords, the lower the competition, and the higher the search volume — the better for you.
High-Quality Content
The quality of content you create has a lot to do with whether you are going to rank or your competition is going to rank. If your content is thin and doesn’t offer a lot of value and your competition has a highly informative article — they are going to win.
When you create content for ranking a specific keyword, you should look at the other pages that are ranking. Look at the different angles on the content and figure out if there is something they aren’t saying that you can say, or if there is a way to make it simpler, so everyone can understand.
Local Links to Your Website
Getting local links to your website is a sure sign to Google and other search engines that your website is relevant to that area.
Some local links you might be able to get are those from newspapers, television stations, local directories, local sites that are dedicated to your industry, chamber of commerce, and other similar organizations.
Not only do local links help you in the search engines, but people can find your website through those links as well. If you have links on a respected site, the search engines and people are more likely to trust your business, even if it is new.
If you don’t have time to do all of the manual work of getting local links to your website, you can hire services that will take care of this work for you.
Getting the Best Results With Local SEO
Now you know more about local SEO and you can start working to get more attention for your business. And not just any attention, but attention from targeted customers that are looking for what you have to offer.
Are you ready to take your local SEO to the next level, but you don’t want to do it yourself? Our team of professionals is here to help you achieve the business growth you need.
Contact us today with any questions, or to get started right away.