Ways That Local SEO Can Help Grow Your Business

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a common term that almost everyone has heard of. Local SEO, on the other hand, seems a foreign concept to many. Unfortunately, the lack of knowledge in this area is costing most local business a lot of money.

If you do not know what that term means or have not added it to your SEO strategy, it is costing your business as well. It is never too late to change that, though. Follow along to learn what local SEO is, why it really matters, how it can benefit you, and more.

What is Local SEO?

For those who have optimized your site for Google searches, this concept will not be difficult to understand. SEO for your website involves optimizing for searches looking for a specific product or service. For instance, if you run an automotive store that not only performs maintenance services but also sells different parts, you would spend most of your time optimizing for selling those parts online.
What about your maintenance services, though? While a customer may purchase a car part from you that is located 10 states away, they are not going to drive that far for an oil change when they have a mechanic right down the road. This all comes down to the fact that while SEO and local SEO are similar, they are also very different.

Why Does Local SEO Matter?

You may think that since you have already put a lot of time and effort into SEO, you should be fine. Why add another project to your to-do list by focusing on local SEO? It may seem redundant, but it really is not. General SEO is optimizing for searches all over the world. You are looking to gain readers, leads and customers from all over the place.

This strategy is not a bad thing at all. In fact, it is a very important step in growing your business. However, this strategy is not going to help if someone searches for a local business and you do not even show up in the results. You also have to optimize for local searches. Your SEO strategy needs to be two-fold: one fold focuses on building your online business while local SEO focuses on the actual physical side of the business.

Check out these statistics about local SEO:

-46% of all Google searches are looking for local information. I repeat, nearly half of the searches on Google are performed to find local information.
-97% searched online to find a local business. This is a staggering amount of people.
-12% of these people search for a local business every day.
-Over half of searches ending with the words “near me” result in a store visit.

Let’s put it into a more personal perspective. Consider the items that you search for on a daily and weekly basis. You may be searching for a pizza parlor, barbershop, nail salon, grocery store, or auto parts store, among other things. If you live in Ohio are you going to pay attention to the pizza parlor located in New York? Probably not, unless you are about to visit New York.

This brings about another point. It is not only local residents that perform local searches. Visitors also perform them because they do not know the area. If you are not utilizing local SEO, you are missing out on business from locals and tourists.

How Can Local SEO Help Grow Your Business

Local SEO can help in many ways, but only if you put the effort into it. Consider this: there are only 3 local spots that show immediately on the first page of search results. You can test this for yourself. Type in “pizza near me” in the Google search bar. In a few seconds, you will see a map of your area and three pizza places.
To see more, you have to physically click the “More Places” spot underneath the first three options. That in itself is a problem because 75% of people never scroll past the first page of results. They tend to take one of the options directly in front of them- statistically, 92% will choose a business on the first page. For those local businesses that rank 4th or more, or do not show up at all, that is a lot of potential business to be throwing away.

In short, if your business is not showing up in those first three spots, locals may not even know that your business exists. Sadly, your business would not be the only one not showing up, however. Though it is free to list your business on Bing Places or Google My Business, 56% of local businesses have not done so. What this comes to is that those top three results are getting all of the business while you are not. You are basically handing your potential customers over to your competition.
Another benefit is that local SEO can even improve your general Google rank. The number of visits your site receives often improves your site’s SEO. When locals begin to visit your site more, the number of website views increase. That fact ranks you higher in the local ranks and in the general ranks.

Tips for Reaching and Staying in the Top Results

While there are never guarantees for success, there are steps that you can take to improve your chances.  The following are a few ways to do so:

Claim your Google My Business Page

List your business under the category closest to yours, even if it if not an exact match. Fill out all of the information you can using both primary and longtail keywords to maximize your chances of gaining a top three spot.

Facebook Business Page

If you have avoided having a Facebook page until now, it is time to get past the aversion. Open a Facebook business page and fill out as much information as you can about your location, how you can be contacted, and your website.

Name, Address, and Phone Number

Verify and update your name, address and phone number across all of your platforms: social media, website, Google My Business Page, and anywhere else you have your business listed. Be sure that this information is exactly the same across all of these platforms so there is an obvious relation between the pages.

Optimize Your Website

You know that SEO is important for showing up in searches, so why would it not be important for showing up in local searches. This process should include regular optimization strategies, such as relevant content, titles, keywords, and so on. If you are not sure what steps you need to take, there are great plugins such as Yoast SEO that analyzes your posts and pages through a checklist. It will then tell you what needs to be fixed as well as give you tips on how to do so.

Consistency

You should also make sure that your location, i.e. the name of your city and state, are included in your homepage, title tags, and anywhere else it makes sense. It does not have to be awkward. You can simply mention on your homepage or “About Us” page that you serve your city and state through the name of your products or services. For instance, “I have been happily catering events in Miami, FL for the last five years.”

Be Specific

Let’s say that you want to hire someone to come clean your house once a week. You search for house cleaners in your area and find an interesting site called “Suzie’s Cleaners. The site guarantees your satisfaction with their one hour cleaning, and the price is great.

You call to set up a meeting and find that Suzie’s is a dry cleaner service, not a house cleaning service. Yet, the website does not specify at all. You might have figured it out eventually by browsing the site but you were in a hurry. How frustrated would you be that this business was not specific?

The solution is to be as specific as possible about what you do and how you do it. Some companies even suggest having a separate page for each product or service that you offer. This will, of course, help the visitor be clear about who they are contacting, but it also helps you. Those products and services are basically keywords. The more you have that are actually relevant to your business, the better your SEO results and the more relevant visits you will have.

Conclusion

It is time to stop giving the guy down the road your business. In order to increase your sales and customer base, it is crucial to focus on the two separate pieces: SEO and local SEO. One can expand your digital territory while the other can grow your physical one. It may require developing an entirely new strategy that combines the two, but the results will be worth it.