What is local SEO?

Local SEO is the practice of optimizing your website for a local area. If you have a local business, like a shop, restaurant, or agency, you want your web pages to rank for certain search queries performed by a local audience. Optimizing the website of your local business is about making sure people can find you online.  All types of businesses that interact with and service customers in a specific region can benefit from local SEO. This includes retail stores, service businesses, restaurants and hotels, hospitals, banks, construction companies, and more.

Here are a few stats that prove how important local search continues to be for businesses:

According to Google, 76% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a business within 24 hours, and 28% of those searches result in a purchase.

• 30% of all searches it processes are related to location, also according to Google.

• 61% of consumers said in a recent local search survey that they search locally every day.

• A recent local SEO survey found that 82% of consumers read online reviews for businesses during a local search and spend close to 14 minutes doing so before making a decision.

• 86% of people rely on Google Maps to find the location of a business.

• Yelp appears in the top five search results for SMB searches 92% of the time.

• Worldwide, 74% of in-store shoppers who performed their search before physically arriving at the store said they searched for things like [closest store near them], [locations], [in stock near them], and other types of hyperlocal information.

• More than half of Internet users worldwide use a mobile device for their local searches.

·        • 83% of searchers use Google Search to learn more about nearby businesses; 55% use Google Maps, 44% Apple Maps, 39% turn to Yahoo, and 31% choose Bing.

How Google Determines Local Ranking

The three main categories of local ranking factors, according to Google, are:

Relevance refers to how well a local Business Profile matches what someone is searching for. Add complete and detailed business information to help Google better understand your business and match your profile to relevant searches,” Google states in its help resource on how to improve your local ranking.

Google defines Distance as “how far each potential search result is from the location term used in a search. If a user doesn’t specify a location in their search, we’ll calculate distance based on what we do know about their location.”

And Prominence in this context refers to how well-known Google considers that business to be. This is perhaps the most complex of the local ranking factor categories, as search algorithms try to factor offline prominence into the equation, as well.

Benefits of local SEO include:

• Increased organic traffic.

• More relevant traffic.

• Reduced ad costs.

• Higher website authority.

• More customer reviews.

• Increased brand awareness and trust.

• More localized backlinks.

• Improved social signals.

• Better website experience for users.

Local SEO strategies

While working on any one of these strategies can help increase your ranking in local search engine results,

1. Claiming Your Google My Business Page

Google is still the most-used search engine, which means using services like Google My Business are a necessity. This free resource lets you get your important information onto Google Search and Maps, including your address, phone number, and hours of operation. Its importance cannot be overstated.

2. Submitting to Local Listing Pages

Checking reviews for services and products is becoming second nature, which means having Yelp page can be very helpful. In addition, some customers still use the online Yellow Pages. Any place that allows you to list yourself as a local business can help you find more people interested in your services or products. Plus, many are free

3. Optimizing Social Media

Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram—your content needs to be easily shareable on all social media platforms. Plus, your accounts should be easy to find. While you don’t need to have an account on every social media application (in fact, it generally doesn’t make sense to), potential customers and clients should easily be able to find links to your social media profiles on your webpages

4. Providing Unique, High-Quality Content

How-to posts, listicles, and articles about current trends in your sector can help add value to your site. The type of content and how it’s delivered will vary depending on your business and brand voice, but the goal remains the same: To provide value to potential customers and clients by delivering useful information about particular subjects.

5. Utilizing Strategic Keywords

Keywords—that SEO buzz-term responsible for some pretty horrible repetitive websites stuffed with nonsense… Well, keywords are here to stay, but Google and other search engines no longer stand for keyword-stuffing. In fact, you can be penalized for it now.

Analyzing Your Local Organic Search Competition

A local organic competition analysis is an essential early step in defining your strategy as it helps you understand what you’re up against in organic search results.

By looking at content, it is possible to figure out:

•          What topics the competition is writing about.

•          How many words they’re writing on average.

•          The frequency of their content updates.

Going through this process helps you understand what they are doing so you can adapt your content strategy and beat theirs accordingly.

By looking at links, it is possible to figure out things like:

•          How many links the competition is getting.

•          What kind of links.

•          Where they’re getting their links from.

•          How often they are getting links.

•          When they are usually getting their links.

Get the Right Reviews for Your Business

Customer reviews can help sell your product or service more effectively than any sales copy. Online reviews play a critical role in earning trust from today’s consumers and establishing a strong brand reputation. No marketing strategy is complete without a plan for acquiring reviews and responding to them.

1. Google Business Profile

Reviews submitted to your Google Business Profile determine your star rating that customers see in Google Search & Maps results. The total number of customer reviews, and overall star rating, is a key factor in ranking your Google Business Profile in the local pack within search results.

2. Industry-Specific Review Sites

Industry-specific review sites are sites built to cater to different verticals, such as Yelp for restaurants and Trip Advisor for hotels. While industry-specific review sites don’t directly impact your star ratings in Google Maps and Google’s local search results, they have the potential to impact your reputation in search results.

3. Product Review Sites

Product review sites are third-party sites designed to help companies earn reviews while vetting them for accuracy. Acquiring a number of positive reviews on product review sites can generate more conversions and positive brand sentiment than reviews on other sites.

4. Social Media

Facebook Business Pages have solidified that brands need to consider social media not only as a marketing outlet but as a place where customers review businesses. When you share, retweet, post, and pin reviews from customers, it’s important to highlight the individual person leaving the review over your own brand.

Local SEO Management Tools

Local SEO tools help you:

• Automate rank tracking.
• Conduct local keyword research.
• Discover competitor insights.
• Monitor performance.

1. Whitespark

 It helps you find the citation opportunities you’re missing to improve relevant local search rankings. The tool is free to use for three searches/day and limited search results – perfect for those exploring the tool. Paid subscriptions start at $33/month when billed annually for five campaigns, 20 searches/day, and unlimited search results.

Feature of Whitespark local SEO tools include:

Local Rank Tracker

This uses precise location settings to give insight into overall SEO performance.

Reputation Builder

This prompts customers (via email or SMS) to share reviews on your review sites of choice. The feature also lets you respond directly to Google reviews and Facebook recommendations.

Review Monitoring

This alerts you if and when you get a bad review so you can immediately take action.

2. Yext

Yext integrates with hundreds of directories to ensure your business information and data are always up-to-date.

Feature of Yext

Knowledge Manager

Answers to consumers’ common questions about your business, including staff, store hours, locations, and promotions.

Yext Pages

A system for updating listings to ensure the information provided is accurate. Yext Pages are optimized to appear in search engines to help give customers more information about your brand’s nearest locations.

Yext Listings

Yext’s local listings management tool integrates with a large network of maps, apps, search engines, and social networks so customers can easily find your business.

Additionally, Yext’s services and solutions include:

• Analytics: Collecting insights, activity, and data for easier reporting.
• Duplicate listing prevention.
• Data cleansing to keep facts consistent.
• Google Business Profile (GBP) and Listings management. Make updates through the platform and publish to GBP at any time.

3. ReviewTrackers

ReviewTrackers is a customer review software tool that sends alerts regarding customer feedback on various review websites, compiling the information in one helpful dashboard.

Using ReviewTrackers, you can:

Solicit feedback from customers.

Monitor reviews from various sources (e.g., Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp).

Track location performance.

4. Moz Local

Moz works by sending your listings to major search engines, apps, directories, and business data aggregators. If you ever need to edit your listing, log back into Moz Local to make a change – you don’t have to edit listings on each directory individually.

Other notable Moz Local features include:

Google and Facebook integration.

Automated duplicate deletion.

Social posting.

5. Synup

Synup is an all-in-one local SEO tool tailored to help your marketing efforts. It lets you manage listings, monitor analytics, and create reports.

Synup’s features also include:

• Automatically syncs business and location data across websites.
• It lets you manage industry and niche-specific sites.
• Crawls over 200 local search engines and directories to catch inconsistencies. 

Now, you understand how important local SEO is for your business, it can still be quite overwhelming. That’s why we placed great care into developing local SEO services that are flexible for businesses and budgets of any size. Whether you’re a new or established business looking to maximize your local presence, we’ve got you covered. Contact us on bhushanwable@gmail.com, +91 8796090783 (WhatsApp) or visit Local SEO Services – SEO-Experts