What is Local SEO and Why Is It Important for Small Businesses
Local SEO is an important part of any small business’s online marketing strategy. It involves optimizing your website and other online assets so that they appear higher in the search engine results for local searches related to your business. Doing this can increase the visibility of your business and reach more potential customers in your area.
Local SEO also helps you to stand out from the competition as it allows you to target specific areas and tailor content to those areas.
In addition, local SEO can help improve customer engagement by providing them with relevant information about your business, such as store hours, location, and contact information. With the right approach to local SEO, small businesses can gain a competitive edge in their local markets and increase their ROI.
How to Optimize Your Site for Local SEO
Google is here not only to promote awesome articles and sell ads but also to promote local businesses to do this google gives a special focus on location-based results.
Let me explain this using an example: Let's say we live in South Dakota, you live in Rapid City and I live in Deadwood, and we both search for restaurants near me and we both will get results but it won’t be the same.
You’ll get different results than mine. Maybe I’ll get a local pizza shop near me and you might get a sushi shop near you. This is done using your location, to provide you with easy navigation to your desired business. For this to happen business owners have to optimize their websites for Local SEO by following the best ranking strategies for local SEO.
This Is How You Optimize Your Site For Local SEO
Claim Your Google My Business Page: A study conducted in 2016 by geomarketing.com shows 56% of retailers have not claimed their Google My Business Page (GMB). Why is this important? Google allows customers to add or change any information on the GMB and you need to keep on updating and ensuring that everything on the GMB is relevant and is true of your business. You need to make sure that everything on the GMB page is completed and optimized.
Add Local Schema Markup on Your Website: To fully optimize your website for local search you need to add Local Schema Markup. Schema markup is not a direct ranking factor in google but it helps google structure your data to show up in relevant search results. Where to place your local schema markup on your website? Wherever you describe your business on your website. If you’ve multiple locations then you’ll need to add schema markup for each city.
Use NAP Citations On Your Website: NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number. Why is it important for your business? Google crawls the web 24*7 and it constantly looks for data so that it can only serve the best and authentic results to its customers. Having the same name, address, and phone number(NAP) increases the confidence of google in your business and it can appear higher in the SERP Local Listing. You need to make sure that the information stays consistent across the web.
Add Business To Local Directories: There are several directories available online for almost every sector you can imagine. In addition to helping with SEO (hello, backlinks! ), listing your company in relevant directories will increase the likelihood that your customers will find you when they search for local businesses. Making sure that every listing properly matches what is on your website and GMB is the key (Google My Business). This is really quick and easy to achieve with the help of tools like Yext.
Reviews Are Important: We are aware that reviews are a crucial and effective marketing tool for every single business out there, and they also aid in local SEO. The second-most important ranking criteria for local businesses, according to a 2017 study, was GMB reviews. This means that the more positive evaluations you can accumulate, the higher you'll start to rank in search. When you have a few reliable reviews, use the aggregate rating schema to add them to your website.
Use Local Keywords: As the name suggests local SEO optimization you would need to use local keywords. You can use local keywords like “service name in your city” or if you’re creating content then you can use “keyword in your city”. This allows you to geotarget your location.
Social Media: Use geolocation on social media pages be it on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn posts. Using social media you can also put in your NAP that is consistent with your websites and other listings.
The Benefits of Targeting Your Content to a Specific Location
According to Google, 46% of searches made on their search engines have local intent.
What does this mean?
If you have optimized your content for geotargeting then you can reach people who are near your location and you have a higher chance of converting them into actual customers.
But how do you do this?
While the answer to this question has been given in the above section on how to optimize your blog for local SEO, this question needs a special focus on Location based content optimization.
Making a content strategy for location targeting may not look that difficult from the top but it takes a lot of work to come up with keywords and topics.
You don't have to worry. I’m giving you an outline that you can use to come up with topics for content targeting your location.
Use Social Listening Tools to Find Problems
Social listening tools like answerthepublic.com now owned by Neil Patel can help you find questions that people are searching for related to your products or services. If you’re using SEO tools like ubersuggest, SEMrush or Ahrefs then put in your product/service name and use the question filter to come up with all the questions your customers are having.
Use Amazon and Other Marketplaces
Amazon and other marketplaces are awesome tools to find what problems people are facing.
With Amazon and other marketplaces you not only get the name of the problem but also details. Customers tend to describe/pinpoint what problems they are facing.
This detailed information gives you enough content already and also suggestions on how you can improve your product/service
Additionally, you can use Q/A websites like Quora, Reddit, and forums to find topics
Use Your City Name In the Title
Now you have enough problems and content and you’ve even started to write and answer the problems your users are having but how do you do location-based content?
You do this by using your city and location name wherever it fits naturally.
The best places to use city names would be in your Meta Title, H1 tags, and in-between content.
Covid-19's impact on local SEO practices
Covid-19 has impacted not only businesses but also consumers.
While business sectors like ed-teach and e-commerce have grown rapidly but small businesses and physical location businesses took a hard hit.
This boom in business based on online service and delivery has an impact on consumers by changing their shopping habits.
People are now preferring to buy things online and get them delivered to their doorsteps.
But, all is not lost.
Even though covid-19 has shifted a large chunk of people shopping behavior to online, it also has made people realize the importance of going out and having experiences.
Now, you don’t need to be an amusement park or a movie theatre owner to deliver experiences but by being just a normal business owner you can also deliver experiences.
You can make people happy, sad, excited, and fearful, and you can make them feel safe there are a number of examples of ice cream shops, pizza parlors, and salons delivering these experiences and emotions to their customers.
To deliver these experiences you can use local SEO to your advantage. You can optimize your website for local search and appear on SERP and drive those people to your store.
Once you get those customers and deliver not only your product/service but also these experiences to them with their permission you can record them and share that on your social media and times if your delivery of service and emotions are good enough people will share about your business too on their social media.
These shared experiences tend to go viral on social media and help bring in a ton of social traffic to your website and new customers as well.
Conclusion
Optimizing for local SEO can help you increase your business and drive more traffic and new customers to your website.
While this is one of the most important parts of your business marketing strategy but this can take up a lot of time. You can do this on your own or you can hire a Local SEO agency or a freelancer to do local optimization for your business. Ariprodesigns can help you with complete marketing for your business. Talk to one of our SEO heads and see if they are a right fit for you and your business.