Importance of Local SEO and How to Optimize it

Importance of Local SEO

As a small local business you’ve probably heard the phrase “local SEO,” or you’ve been told you “need to optimize your business listing for local search.”

In return, you might have shown confusion in your eyes, or you have felt overwhelmed, wondering “what exactly is local SEO?, what is its difference from existing SEO efforts? And how exactly should I start?”

Do not worry, this post will describe how your business can be optimized for a marketing strategy to local search engines. As a subset of SEO practices, local SEO involves three factors:

• Local listings and quotations
• Online reviews
• Local SEO site optimization   

This post will show an introduction to each of these components, and probably on succeeding articles, speak to each in depth. If you’re ready to start becoming a place with excellent visibility, then you’re in the right place. First, let’s see how modern consumer looks and currently buys.

The modern consumer

Not long ago, the client should go to the local section of newspapers or yellow pages to find a local business, searching by category. By finding what he wanted, he wrote down the address and telephone number of the establishment to make a call from home.

Those standards sound a bit outdated now, right?

Currently, more than 125 million American consumers bring a smartphone, representing 54% of people who consume a product. Here we break down how they use their smartphone to access local information:

•  47% of customers use their smartphone to search for information from a local business
• 29% of smartphone users are willing to scan a code that makes them get coupons
• About 50% of people will search for a product from their smartphone before buying.   

It is a common practice that you have searched for a keyword followed by your city. For example, instead of just searching for “burger,” you search for “burger in Jacksonville.”

MOZ Local highlights the following statistics to give small businesses an idea of how often consumers are looking for locally:

• 4 trillion desktop searches in the US are intended locally.
• Over 50% of smartphone searches have local intent.
• Almost 15-20% of searches are mobile

Based on that statistics, it is estimated that there are approximately 7 billion different monthly local searches on Google in the US. Searches such as Jacksonville SEO marketing is not uncommon.

Well, now that you agree on the importance of local SEO optimized for your business, the following are some of the few places to start doing it.

Local listings and quotations

There are literally hundreds of places where you can list your business online, and basically creating local lists is a key to any local SEO company, but take a step back and think for a while why it is so important.

To better understand the importance of these lists and appointment it’s better to recognize the motives and experiences of two relevant variables, search engines, and users.

Users are saturated with so many options that are available to them, either food places, clothing stores or gas stations. So seekers will make your life much easier by allowing them to enter some keywords, and change several options and well positioned based on some factors that will facilitate their decisions and can help them make the transaction. If the recommendations are satisfactory, users will return to the browser and use it again, allowing you to monetize through advertising.

To ensure complete satisfaction, searchers process massive data loads to provide the most relevant and best-valued option, all ordered by geographical location. The quality of this data is used to process information and can make or break a service, and this was precisely what Google separated from other search engines because it provides the best and most relevant results.

So how do you ensure that data is reliable? Through cross-referencing of each data point via the web. However, there are three main corridors whose data are from the likes of Google, Bing, Yahoo, Apple and more options, especially when it comes to small business listings, and are:

• Infogroup
• Neustar Localeze
• Dexknows

Data that provide these giants are backed by public business listing services such as:

• Google+ local
• Yelp
• Bing Places
• Yellow Pages
• Yahoo Local
• Foursquare

Essentially, the more visitors your business listings have, a better picture of consistency and reliability for many data providers will be painted, and will be an option for Google or any other search engine when someone types your keyword. Quality and relevance are essential to remember.

Google Local Business Optimization

How to Rank your Google My Business Results / Listings

Recently, I have been spending a lot of my time over the last few months, researching and experimenting, on how to get on the 1st page of the Google local business results. Many of my successful listings are through continuous testing & experimentation.

Google My business listings is a golden opportunity to get yourself up in the rankings of Google for your relevant geographical keywords much easier and quicker than Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the best thing of all, it is free!

Here are various tested techniques/ways that I have used to get many of my own and clients’ websites successfully on the local business listings:

1. Get as many free listings in the local directories as possible. One tip to find these local directories is to check the ‘web pages’ under the details of the local business listings. Sometimes these web pages will show you the local directories they are listed on.

2. Optimise the title/name in the local directories for the keyword you want, eg if you want to rank for ‘Sydney Widgets’, have this in your title/name.

3. Same with the above, optimise the company/organization name in the local business centre for your keyword. (I got a successful listing for a couple of keywords just by optimizing the name, of which these keywords ranking for don’t even have a website).

4. Under the address information in local business centre, make sure you have the city location chosen as the city you want listing for.

5. Under the description in the local business centre, optimise it for the keywords you want. Of course, don’t spam it!

6. Under the categories of the local business centre, choose the most relevant category. Also, you can add in manually the category. In this case, add in ‘Sydney Widgets’.

7. When you upload your photos, try to optimise it (name of the file) for the keyword as well (I guess all of what I have mentioned are some basics of Search engine optimization (SEO)

8. Make sure you enter in as many details as possible in the local business centre, example hours of operations, payment options, upload photos & videos if you have, and other additional details as well. The more details you put in, the more the Google local business centre’s algorithm will see you as a serious listing and therefore making your listing more successful.

9. Try to add coupons if you can as this will definitely help. As mentioned before, videos will also help a lot.

10. Reviews seem like one of the important criteria that Google looks at when assigning rankings on the local business ads results. Try to encourage reviews from your customers. Don’t fake it! Google can effortlessly discover and you may get yourself booted out from your local map listings. I have seen in many successful listings where there are no reviews. However, try to encourage reviews anyway as reviews does help promote your site to other potential visitors/customers as well.

11. Obviously, example to be successful in the listings for ‘Sydney widgets’, your site content should be ‘Sydney widgets’ relevant.

12. Basics of SEO – optimise the title, meta description and keyword tags for your keywords.

13. There are occasions where your listing may disappear, log into your local business centre again and update it again (example, re-upload photos, re-edit your description etc) and it should come back up again in an hour or so (from my experience)

14. I do believe that part of the local business listings’ algorithm, Google does look at external links going to your site as well. Example, if you have other sites linking to you with the link text ‘Sydney widgets’, I am sure this will help as well.

Below are some other techniques which I have not used listed by others that have said to improve the local business results:

• Include your Contact number every time you write a description of your company on a third party website.

• Include your address and phone number at the bottom of every page.

• Include the name of your city and state in your website’s content, titles, descriptions and page headers (I reckon this is quite an important component, so try to do it although I haven’t done this)