Local SEO is one of the essential optimization strategies to work on when a business wants to reach people nearby. With this practice, your company can become a reference in your region and attract new customers who need and want to invest money in a specific product or service.
Have you ever thought about how many people are looking for your business on the Internet? Or, how many of them could make contact with you, visit you or become clients? If you have a physical location and you want that to start happening to you, you need to know what local SEO is!
Search engine optimization strategies, as we know, are essential for Digital Marketing.
Increasingly, Google has become a personal assistant for any problem, including quickly finding a nearby restaurant, viewing its menu, or reserving a table for later. With these optimization strategies, you will be able to improve the organic positioning of your business so that those users looking for solutions at a particular time in a specific region can find you.
Thanks to a good position within the results of the pages of each search engine, your business will gain greater visibility and have more opportunities to win new customers. Therefore, in this context, we will show you how local SEO works and how to position your site in the results of that search.
What is local SEO?
In short, local SEO is a set of search engine optimization strategies that seeks to improve the positioning of a brand when users search for solutions within a specific location or want to find the most suitable option.
This type of optimization focuses less on the company’s site but on its Google My Business page, which we will know in depth in this article.
Local SEO is designed for searches that contain a geographic component — here’s the difference from regular SEO. The location of the user looking for local businesses or indicating a specific region in the terms or keywords, such as “downtown Guadalajara” or “in Jalisco,” triggers the local search algorithm and modifies how Google shows its results.
This type of search offers an authentic look. Google intends to provide a better user experience during its interaction, which is why it dedicates all its efforts to guarantee better results with the most excellent agility possible. So when a person searches for a restaurant or a movie theatre on Google, the SERP understands that they likely need options close to where they are.
What does that tell us? Well, the user’s location becomes a relevant factor in filtering and classifying the results since it allows the user to quickly find, in the first position, the option that he needs. With the increase in searches on mobile devices, the geographic component has become super important for Google. In the end, smartphones accompany us everywhere, so users demand that the search engine have intelligence capable of offering relevant answers according to the location in real-time.
In this way, if you are, for example, at a congress in Germany and you search for “exchange house,” Google will offer you results in the city or town where you are. You do not need to specify that you need to exchange houses in Berlin because Google knows you are there.
So, to increase the chances of your business appearing in those searches, local SEO needs to show Google that you’re optimised for the regions where those users are and tell Google that you’re a business that has relevance in those places.
Later, you will understand what Google considers most important to do and improve the positioning in that search.
What are the benefits offered by local SEO?
Google is increasingly helping users to explore their cities. Although today’s world is digital, people continue discovering restaurants when travelling or going to the movies close to home.
For this reason, the search engine focuses on improving users’ search experience so that they find tangible solutions in real life.
Therefore, investment in local SEO represents a golden opportunity for companies to improve their positioning and increase their visibility in front of those people.
But is it worth optimising this local search for any business?
Before you learn about the benefits of local SEO, you must understand that this resource will only be helpful for companies with a physical location to sell, such as e-commerce.
So this type of work is valuable for those businesses that receive public locally.
We refer to the following:
- pubs,
- restaurants,
- cafes,
- theatres,
- cinemas,
- nightclubs such as discotheques,
- stores,
- malls,
- Hotels,
- inns,
- Beauty salons,
- barbershops,
- schools,
- medical consultants,
- hospitals and,
- any business with a physical store or face-to-face customer service
These optimizations are worthwhile for these types of companies, and we made this article.
If you want to learn more, in the following lines, you will discover the main benefits local SEO can provide to businesses like the ones mentioned above.
Increase visibility in a region
This is the main benefit that any SEO strategy provides, regardless of the type of user it impacts.
In the case of local search, optimization helps position a business among its many competitors in a given geographic location, thereby increasing its brand visibility on the web.
You can increase visibility in a region with google reviews. Customer positive reviews are the best option to enhance brand credibility, so collecting google my business reviews is imperative. If you do not have enough google positive reviews, you have to buy google reviews to increase the band’s credibility.
Incentive to action
In the customer journey, local searches represent a stage very close to contact with the company.
For example, someone who searches for a nightclub on Google may be considering options to have fun with their friends next weekend or even that same day.
Then, the results of that search are the basis of the decisions that cause an action: the person can contact the business, see the reviews of other users, see photos of the place and find out how to get to the site.
If your business has local SEO optimised, you will be able to appear in the top positions, giving you more chances of being the best option for consumption or purchase.
A survey by Think With Google verified everything we’ve told you so far. That study showed that 76% of people who do a local search on a phone visit the business in the next 24 hours and that 28% of those searches lead to a sale.
You see the importance of local SEO!
Increase your local authority
For the consumer who sees the results of a Google search, the links that appear in the first positions are the ones with the most credibility. In the end, to appear at the top of this ranking is because these companies have earned the trust of the public and, of course, the search engine.
When it comes to local searches, those will further demonstrate your authority in the market within your region, as they will rank you above your competition.
Attract new types of audience
Local searches are also a way to discover new businesses in cities. Local people who may have never heard of your pizzeria can now find it in such a search.
Therefore, local SEO makes you appear to new potential customers without investing in other channels.
When a local customer comes to your website for the first time, he will be more interested in your products when he sees the good reviews of your previous customers about your business.
So it would help if you collected more positive reviews. Permanent Reviews will be your best option for managing positive reviews. And so positive Google reviews can bring in a vast new audience for your business
Conclusion
Local SEO, therefore, represents a special place for searches by users with local intent. Unlike average searches, this type of search aims to find quick and localised answers that help people make decisions in their journey.
So, to have your business among the main options to be considered, start applying local SEO strategies. As you may have sensed, some traditional SEO tips apply here. But specific elements can be crucial in optimising against your competitors.
