What Is Local SEO? The Complete Guide For Every Small Business
Finally, by assigning a single page to each of your product and service offerings, you can quickly build your brand authority. Local SEO is a cost-effective way to increase your company’s presence in local searches. Most local business listings are free (Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc.) and are relatively easy to maintain. Many local businesses have successfully invested their time in local SEO versus paid campaigns.
It’s telling that Google Local Pack results appear above regular organic search results. Therefore, local SEO services provide a means for a local business to remain competitive with larger national companies. Here are the essential points on how to take your local SEO efforts to the next level.
This includes everything from claiming a list of businesses to making sure a franchise’s location shows up in a local Google search. It also extends to managing online ratings and reviews, participating in locally targeted social media, and more. To get into the local package, you need reviews, which are one of the top three factors to get higher rankings. This is because reviews are very powerful when it comes to convincing the customer.
If a web user with an immediate need sees your local listing, they will likely choose to buy from you. When they do their search, they are more likely to choose your business than your competitors who may be further away from them. Almost all consumers search online for local businesses, and more than 10% of people perform local searches every day. To gather information for local search, search engines rely on signals such as local content, social profile pages, links, and citations to provide the most relevant local results for the user. Local SEO is becoming increasingly important as search engines change the way they use search engines.
Many local listing guides allow consumers to list reviews of their experience with a local business or their thoughts on a specific product or service. This gives potential customers the confirmation they need to proceed with their purchase from you. Whitespark’s local search ranking factors place GMB signals as the most crucial element for any online brand looking to appear in local package results. Google is also the first place that 63% of consumers will visit for reviews before visiting the company. It’s a way to build backlinks from different websites with a similar audience so you can achieve a high ranking and get as many local visitors as possible.
Neglecting this improvement can be a missed opportunity to attract more customers and revenue. You can further optimize your GMB profile by regularly sharing commercial updates and new content. And Sprout Social makes it easier with a new feature to post directly to your GMB profile.
There has been a steady increase in searches that include “near me” and are done on mobile devices since the early 2010s and this trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. With more searches on mobile devices, users often don’t want to click through a website to find basic information. Local SEO allows them to see a company name, contact information, schedules, reviews, and more directly on the results page.
Make the most of the Sprout GMB feature to keep your customers up to date on what’s new and share details about upcoming events. This helps you connect with your customers on a deeper level and increase your visibility into local searches. SEO refers to the method marketers use to make their website appear organically on a search engine’s results page when someone searches local search results for terms related to the company’s products or services. In this way, SEO connects companies with potential customers using search engines. Even if you’re an online-only business, you want your web pages to appear when users search for related products and services. If most people use local searches to do this, make sure your web pages are present in your search results.
When you’re trying to decide which business to serve in the local package, your Google My Business profile is 25% of the ranking factor in Google’s local algorithm. Local SEO services, such as traditional SEO, are a marketing strategy designed to optimize a company’s organic search engine rankings. Unlike traditional SEO, local SEO services are designed to target certain consumers in a particular location. Therefore, businesses that rely on local customers for sales and revenue or are limited to serving a specific region can often get more local SEO activity than traditional SEO services. Reviews can help your rankings, but more importantly, positive reviews drive more leads and conversions. In this lecture, Darren will teach you the latest strategies and tactics to improve your review game on Google and other important sites so that consumers prefer your business over the competition.
And according to Moz, it’s one of the most important factors Google will consider when ranking businesses in local organic search and snack package results. Ten years ago, ranking on Google and other search engines was a piece of cake, but now it has changed drastically due to the huge increase in the number of websites. Today, companies spend a large portion of their marketing budget on experts or agencies to help their websites rank higher in search engines. The reason is that they know that the ROI of local search engine optimization is much more than many other marketing methods. Decide if you should take the plunge and use local SEO to help your business grow.