“Local SEO” for a Local Business – the Best Way to Improve Your Business
Site optimization, advertising campaigns on social networks and everything else Internet can offer has enabled local businesses overcome local limits. Nowadays, with the help of the Internet, the target market is not just the city where your business is located, but the whole country and, ultimately, the whole world.
However, some businesses are local in their nature and they have no choice but to remain local. A pizzeria from your neighborhood can provide delivery services to customers from the other end of the town, but they can’t expand their market to surrounding cities. This is true for many other kinds of businesses. Therefore, local entrepreneurs are interested in local customers from their surroundings. Although, at first sight, it seems that everyone already knows about a business whose target market is relatively small and limited, that is, actually, not true.
For example, many people have no idea who fixes air-conditioners in their neighborhood, until they suddenly break down in the middle of the August heat. So, what do we do in such situations? We take our phone or computer and type in “air conditioning service Novi Beograd”, “air conditioning service Nis” or some other location in Google Search. One study has shown that smartphone users in the USA search for information about local businesses online 95 percent of the time (they search for local products and services). In the same study, there are two more incredible conclusions:
77% of those who use smartphones to search for local businesses will contact one of them
59% of those who use smartphones to search for local services will visit one of the local businesses found on Google Search the very same day
This information is essential to understanding how important “local SEO” is. When a local business has a high ranking in Google Search, someone who lives in the same town (neighborhood, street) is almost definitely going to choose it. People look for the closest, fastest and easiest solutions.
How to Optimize Your Site in Accordance with “Local SEO” Requirements
The aim of a local business owner is to “collect” all potential clients from their neighborhood in Google Search. The aim of the person using Google Search to locate a certain product or service is to find it in their own town. Therefore, it’s in the best interest of both the person from Nis whose air-conditioner is broken and the air-conditioning service owner form Nis to have the site of that service among the first search results. It appears that there shouldn’t be any problems. And there won’t be any indeed if the site is properly optimized and if its target is local.
What do you have to do in order to have a site optimized in accordance with “local SEO” requirements?
On-site optimization
Google Plus Local and Google My Business account setup
Social networks
In order to achieve this, you need to adjust the site content to your needs, that is, you need to direct it to a limited target market. When it comes to the site itself, optimization in accordance with “local SEO” principles requires title tags which contain a geographical determinant, beside the service offered. The same goes for H1 tags and URLs too. You should send signs to Google that you have a local determinant all over the site.
In the second place, make sure your contact data on the site are easily noticeable, 100% complete and true. The address, phone number, e-mail and working hours – all of those are important to the user, and to Google too.
What you need to work on outside the site are Google Plus Local and Google My Business. Adjusting the data on these two sites properly can be crucial, since, nowadays, there is a map on the right side of the search results. That way the user can see the closest and most relevant results and the contact data are there too. It is important that the data on those accounts match the ones on your site. Inconsistency is considered a bad sign by Google because it is suspicious.
In that regard, you need to set up profiles for your firm on different business portals, and make sure that the data you list there are also true and the same like everywhere else.
Last, but not least, you have to support the whole story on your business profiles on social networks. Seventy percent of users say that they trust businesses who share information on social networks more.
These are just some of the tasks that influence “local SEO”. There are, also, the standard SEO procedure and other elements of a proper Internet presentation. Just the way Internet can help a business get hold of a wide market, it can also help them gain the most of a local market.
For details on site optimization and Internet marketing, you can contact us here.
