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Those standards sound a bit outdated now, right?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.
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)
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