Get Your Local SEO Basics Right to Attract New Customers

What Is Local SEO in Digital Marketing?

Local SEO refers to a search engine optimization strategy that can help increase the online visibility of your business in location-based search results. It involves optimizing your online presence with the aim of increasing local traffic and building brand awareness.

How Is Local SEO Different From SEO?

In the broad sense, search engine optimization aims to improve your website’s online presence nationally or globally. However, with local SEO, the focus shifts to a specific region or more. For example, if you have law offices in New York and Los Angeles, it would make sense to focus on these two locations. Besides, local SEO involves more than your website.

How Local SEO Works

Search engines like Google rely on elements such as localized content, citations, links, and social media pages to collect information for local searches and provide the most suitable results. By developing a local SEO strategy, you can position your products/services to potential customers who carry out relevant searches.

Some of the factors that need your attention if you wish to get on the local SEO bandwagon include optimizing your business profile, finding the most appropriate local keywords, and creating locally relevant content.

Which Business Is Likely to Benefit From Local SEO Practices?

If you have a business that caters to a specific geographic area or if you have a brick-and-mortar setup, you may get to enjoy local SEO benefits. There’s a simple way to find out which business is likely to benefit most from local SEO practices. Carry out a search on Google using keywords that are appropriate for your business. If the results page comes with a “map pack” (set of three map-based results), a local SEO strategy can help you attract more customers.

Why Is Local SEO Important?

Local SEO is important because a significant number of consumers turn online to look for local businesses. Given that potential customers might be looking for your offerings, developing a local SEO strategy gives you the ability to make your presence felt in the right manner. According to data collated by Ahrefs:

• 76% of web users who use their smartphones to carry out local searches visit relevant businesses within a day.
• 28% of local searches result in purchases.
• 6% of consumers are likely to go through reviews of businesses on Google before visiting their physical locations.
• 88% of consumers will deal with businesses that reply to all their reviews.
• 58% of businesses don’t pay adequate attention to local search.

Advantages of Local SEO

According to Statista, the U.S. was home to more than  311 million smartphone users in 2023, which means that a significant number of Americans are accessing the internet on the go. Web searches are not just about making online purchases; many people use the internet to look for offline businesses near them. This simply indicates that even businesses that do not sell online should do their best to invest in local SEO.

Know that many people who carry out local searches don’t have specific names of businesses in mind. They simply use general categories to search. This means that with a website optimized for local searches, you can attract a great deal of traffic to your online or offline store. You just need to use the right strategies and watch the results unfold.

How to Improve Local SEO for Small Businesses?

Go through any local SEO checklist and you will see that the process involves creating web pages that describe the goods and services you offer and highlight the locations from where you operate. This information should include the state, city, and area, and should find its way into on-page elements like meta descriptions and page titles.

Pages should also include the address and the phone number of your business. Googlebot pays attention to contact details on web pages, which makes it a tad simpler to present this important information.

Optimize Your Business Profile on Google

As a business owner, you may create a business profile on Google for free. This is perfect for local SEO because Google is quick to verify, support, and share its own content. Once Google verifies your business, you may even benefit from getting a much-coveted spot in the search engine’s map pack. Creating and managing a Google business profile is fairly straightforward and you’ll need to:

• Provide business-related details like a phone number, address, website, and hours of operation.
• Add suitable images.
• Include an informative yet concise description.
• Encourage customers to provide reviews.
• Monitor reviews and respond to them promptly.
• Share details about new launches, promotions, offers, and events by publishing relevant posts.

While optimizing your Google business listing is good from the local SEO point of view, it also helps improve your target audience’s overall experience. After all, finding up-to-date information about your business is important for its existing and potential customers, and if they don’t, they might head to your competitors. If you think your existing local SEO strategy is failing, make sure you’re not faltering on this front.

Analyze Your Competition

An important aspect of developing a good local SEO strategy is to determine what you’re up against by analyzing your competition’s online presence. This analysis gives you access to information that can help you achieve your local SEO goals. Looking at your competitors’ content gives you an indication of the type of content they provide and the frequency at which they add new posts.

Analyzing your competition also gives you the means to determine what sets you apart, and you may use this information to develop a unique selling proposition (USP) that resonates with your target audience. In addition, this process can help you identify gaps in the market that you may then fill by developing suitable products or services.

Use the Right Keywords

Consider an example that revolves around building local SEO for a moving company in New York. A good title for your top article written for SEO purposes should include “Moving Company in New York”.

To enhance the efforts, you may include other relevant keywords surrounding this industry. A good idea is to focus on the other services you offer. These should ideally be services that your potential customers seek. Here are a few moving company local SEO examples when it comes to getting the titles right.

• Special moving services in New York
• Same-day moving in New York
• Long-distance moving in New York
• Packing services in New York
• Storage in New York

As you build your list of relevant local SEO keywords, traffic headed your website’s way will also increase. This is because people search for different services related to the same industry and they will most probably come across your website if you have optimized it for local search.

Focus on Search Intent

For quite some time, Google and other search engines have become all about user experience (UX). This means they work hard to provide more than just keyword-based results. For example, Google works by determining the intent of a user’s query based on several elements.

If you search the word “art” on your computer, Google will typically include pictures of art or art ideas. If you use your mobile phone for the same search, the results will include locations of art galleries near you. This is because most people searching for businesses on their mobile phones are probably looking for physical locations or addresses.

In such cases, while Google considers the keyword as the priority, it also accounts for the location of the user and the device used to carry out the search. Since it is common for local results to appear in most searches, focusing on search intent is vital to get your local SEO right.

Ensure Consistency in NAP

NAP is an acronym for the name, address, and phone number of a business. If you want people conducting online searches to find your business easily, you need to keep your NAP up to date. In addition, search engines should be able to identify your NAP as crawlable text so they may display it accurately when people carry out location-based searches.

Remember that your NAP should be the same as what you add to your Google business listing. If your business has multiple locations, you may add all your NAPs on every page or choose to add them on location-specific pages.

Pay Attention to Directories and Citations

In the U.S., the four major map data aggregators that provide map-related information to Google, Apple, Bing, Yelp, and the like include:

• Express Update
• Neustar Localeze
• Factual
• Foursquare

Pay close attention to your citations on these platforms and ensure that they are consistent. If you find discrepancies in the form of incorrect spellings, wrong phone numbers, or incomplete addresses, correct them immediately. This is because if search engines can’t tell which information is right, they might choose not to show your business listing in their search results. It is also ideal that you remove duplicate listings of your business from online directories.

Use Keyword-Specific Pages

If you offer multiple products or services, there is little chance that your website’s homepage will rank well for all desired keywords. As a result, it’s best that you assign specific keywords to different pages. A fairly simple way to allocate keywords to web pages is to look at the products/services they describe.

Moving forward with the example of implementing local SEO for a moving company, while one page might talk about moving services, another might focus on packing services. As a result, you may target “packing services in New York” for the packing services page, and you could target “same-day moving in New York” for the moving services page.

Optimize Content, URL, Headers, and Metadata

Optimizing your content for local SEO and providing locally relevant content can work wonders for your business. Every new blog post you add is a newly indexed page through which you get to target a geographic keyword. This increases the likelihood of people finding your business when they conduct relevant searches. When you add new content, make sure you use the right keywords not only in the content but also in the header text, title, URL, and metadata.

Local SEO Examples

You may consider using content in different forms as part of your local SEO strategy based on your requirements and goals. Here are a few examples from the content marketing point of view.

• Location-specific landing pages. When it comes to ranking for local keywords, turning to location-specific landing pages is the way to go. A location landing page represents a particular real-world location, and it helps provide relevant details to search engines and consumers alike. A location might come in the form of a suburb, city, county, or state.
• FAQs page. An FAQs page or more can work rather well when it comes to providing local SEO-related content. You may use these pages to answer common questions about your business, its locations, and its offerings.
• Pages for specials/promotions. Local business owners stand to gain significantly by keeping dedicated pages for specials, promotions, and offers. By doing this, you stand to increase your brand’s appeal among local audiences.

Conclusion

Given the number of people who look for local businesses online, it is important to implement a local SEO strategy to push your website up the ladder on search engine results pages and improve your overall online presence.

If you feel your knowledge of local SEO basics is not enough to get you on the right track, consider partnering with a professional SEO agency. This will give your target audience the means to find your business easily, which will consequently increase web traffic, foot traffic, and sales.