What Is Local SEO & Why Is It Important For Your Business?

Every business owner needs strong SEO strategies to back their website up on the internet so they can gain deserved recognition. It is quite common nowadays for businesses to have their own websites and social media accounts to connect with their audiences. If you have been working on the internet for some time, you must have already heard about SEO. 

Search Engine Optimization is a marketing tool that is used to drive organic traffic to websites. Browsers use SEO to determine which website or page ranks higher on their search results. The higher your rank is, the better your chances of people visiting your site. Google values user experience more than anything, so it keeps updating its algorithm every year to ensure that users get the most relevant results at the top. As a business owner, you might find it difficult to stay updated about the changing algorithms, but a local SEO agency can surely help you handle your SEO strategies better.

What is Local SEO?

Once you have understood the functionality of SEO, it is essential to understand the importance of local SEO as well. Local SEO doesn’t have a specified definition; however, it refers to the process of optimising your content and website for audiences of a particular location. This SEO strategy is very useful when a user searches for something with their location’s name, for example, “carpet cleaning in London.” When this happens, Google looks for businesses based in that area and ranks the results accordingly. To ensure that your business shows up in the top results, you need to optimise your business for local SEO. 

In this blog, we will discuss the importance of local SEO services for your business.

Why Should I Focus On Local SEO?

Many businesses, even to this day, ignore local SEO, which is not a good move. If you own a business that targets a specific area, you must apply local SEO services to your strategies. Users nearby are your potential customers, and you need to ensure that your business is visible to them. That can only happen with local SEO services. After COVID-19, the importance of local SEO has increased greatly as people prefer to purchase something from nearby, and it is expected to grow even further in the future. 

There’s absolutely no reason for you not to focus on local SEO services in your business. It improves the locality and visibility of your business while also increasing brand awareness. In fact, you might already be using some local SEO strategies without knowing by using local keywords.

Steps To Start Local SEO

Following are some steps that will help you get started with local SEO.

Localised Content

It is essential to create localised content if you wish to rank higher on local SEO. There are a few ways to do that. First is that your contact details, including phone number, email, and address, should be easily found on your website. Another thing you should do is use local keywords in your content, so Google knows that your content is for a specific location. For example, if you are offering your services in a specific city in the UK, you can mention it in your content and keywords. Using locations in your content and keywords is the most important step of local SEO service.

However, you also need to ensure that you refrain from keyword stuffing. Google used to rank keyword-stuffed content several years ago, but this strategy doesn’t work anymore. Google gives utmost importance to user experience and only wants to recommend relevant pages to them. So make sure that you only use relevant keywords at the right places, so Google can rank your content higher, and users also find it helpful and valuable.

Keep an Eye on Google Updates

Google is the most used search engine in the world, and it is a known fact that everyone uses Google when they want to see more results for their query. You must ensure that you rightly target Google users with your content. As we mentioned, Google updates its algorithms every year, which makes it slightly difficult to keep local SEO services on track. You need to make sure that you keep an eye on Google updates so you can quickly abandon outdated strategies and adopt new ones. 

A local SEO agency can help you do this without compromising your time. As a business owner, you must be responsible for many more important things, but no need to be worried when local SEO agencies are here to help you with it.

Get Customer Reviews

Many people nowadays rely greatly on customer reviews. It helps them make the right choice, and they can expect something from the business after seeing reviews. Google also ranks the websites with positive reviews higher, so it not only benefits your customers but it also makes ranking easier for your business. Many businesses also try to get reviews on their social media accounts which also serves as traffic driven through off-page SEO. Positive customer reviews also help your business have a positive brand image, and you get more customers to your business.

Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

We cannot emphasise enough on this. Creating a mobile version of your website is crucial for businesses now. Google has made it official a few years ago that it crawls and indexes websites by their mobile versions, so if you don’t have a mobile version of your site, Google won’t be able to crawl, and it won’t get ranked. 

It amazes us to see how many brands still don’t know the importance of the mobile-friendliness of their website. Most users now browse on their mobile phones, which has made Google update its algorithm. The search engine wants its users to have the best experience, and when it saw the need to have mobile-friendly websites, it made it necessary. It won’t matter if you apply all the SEO techniques but don’t make your website mobile-friendly. You need to ensure that Google crawls your site, and that can only happen if you create a mobile version for the users.

Optimise Your Content For Voice Search

AI is taking over the world, and it is expected to get even smarter in the upcoming years. Voice assistants have already made browsing much more convenient for users, but it has also added to the business owner’s responsibilities. Now you have to optimise your content for voice search as well, so if your customer searches by speaking, your content is recommended to them. 

Typing is different from voice search, and people speak differently when they are searching for something online. You have to optimise your content, so Google can understand the customers’ queries and recommend your content to them if it is relevant. Customers often search for long-tail keywords when they are searching through voice search, which makes it essential for you to create your content accordingly. Long-tail keywords are important for new updates in SEO. You should also try to create your content in a conversational tone to make it optimised for voice search.

Create Content Based on Local News

There’s no better way to grab the attention of a local audience than speak to them about local issues. You need to create content about local news and issues to become visible to your audiences. You can write blogs, create videos, and give updates about local stories to customers from specific areas. You can also make separate pages for each area if you are targeting an entire region with your business. For example, if you have a real-estate business, you can give updates about each area on its separate page so customers can easily find it.

Add Local Keywords

It is a no-brainer that you need to add keywords to your content to rank on Google. However, what keywords are right to add is where business owners make mistakes. Local SEO services require you to use keywords highlighting local issues. You need to use localised keywords that mention your area or region of the target so Google can know that you have created this content for that specific area. It becomes easier for Google to recommend your website to the local audience when you specify which area you are aiming to target with your content.

Create Location Pages

It is not essential that you only target one area with your business. You can have different places in different cities, and you can also target the audiences separately. However, having location pages for each area on your website is essential. You need to mention the details of each of your offices so customers can easily find them. This serves as an effective strategy in local SEO services. These pages need to provide the details like address, phone number, store hours, parking availability, testimonials, and last but not least, google maps attached to the locations for users’ convenience.

Dedicate A Webpage For Each Product

While we understand that it can be a lot of work to create a separate page for each product, and you can be tempted to add as many products on one page as you can. However, it is not the right move, and it will lower your chances of ranking higher on Google with local SEO. You need to create a dedicated page for each product on your website so Google can know that you have a business specified for these things. If you are a business without several products to offer but have offices at different locations. You can create dedicated pages for each location and add details about your product there.

Final Thoughts

SEO makes it easier for customers to find the right information on the internet, but it makes the competition just as tough for businesses. This marketing tool changes rapidly, and one needs to stay updated if one wishes to stay relevant to the audience. Google will introduce new changes in the algorithm with time, which is why it is important to benefit from the existing features as much as you can. You can follow this guide to get started with your local SEO services. Now that you know how much importance local SEO holds for your business, it should be easy to focus on these strategies.

If you want a local SEO agency to handle your local SEO services for better visibility and results, visit Trajital. With our expert marketers, we are the best SEO agency in the UK. Our team is passionate about SEO, and we are always ready to serve our clients to the best of our abilities so that they can reach the heights of success. We aim to build trustable and dependable relationships with our clientele, and we strive to make things work for the best.

FAQs About Local SEO

1. How do I know if I need local SEO?

There are many things that can answer this question. The main purpose of local SEO service is to be seen in a specific area. If the people around your business need to find it, and if you want to target customers from a specific geographic area, you need local SEO services in your business. A local SEO service is more important if you want to serve your customers in person.

2. What do I need for local SEO?

Local SEO is done on the internet, so the first thing you need to apply these strategies is a website. You cannot work on local SEO services without having a reliable website. You also need to do proper market research about the area you are aiming to target. Whether it is the customers or your competitors, you need to gather as much information as you can to create effective strategies. Another thing that will help you get better local SEO results has more social media accounts. Create pages on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for better results.

3. How do I stay updated about changing algorithms?

Google usually keeps its algorithm a secret and doesn’t officially announce many changes to keep this game interesting. However, there are many experts that can help you in this matter. Firstly, you don’t have to handle your SEO strategies yourself. You can hire a local SEO agency to manage your digital marketing while you focus on making your products or services better for your customers. You can discuss it with marketing experts if you still want to know about changing algorithms. Since they are continuously working with SEO, they can easily identify the changes in the algorithm before others.

5. Is local SEO really beneficial?

Local SEO makes your business more visible to the customers, which automatically increases profitability for your business as well. You get a better knowledge of your customers, sales are increased, you get a better ranking on Google, popularity is increased, customer reviews add great value to your website, you get better traffic on the website, and the awareness around your brand is also increased. These are just a few benefits of local SEO, but believe us, as you will, local SEO services provide businesses with many more benefits like these.

6. How local is local SEO?

Many people have this question in mind when they are working with local SEO. They wonder if they will be limiting their online visibility by making their content more local. However, it is not true. While the radius in which Google recommends your content depends on the query of the customers, we can say that the visibility of your content is not extremely specified. If you have localised your content for a city, Google will try to recommend it to people who search for it with your city’s name.

7. Can I handle local SEO myself?

Of course, you can.

If you want to handle your SEO services yourself, no one can stop you from doing it. However, it is important to understand that it is not as easy as it may seem at first. SEO requires a lot of time, effort, and consistency to work its magic. As a business owner, you might not have enough time to spend on SEO. You will need to learn a lot about local SEO before handling it yourself, and it will require a lot of time. The easy way to do it is to hire a local SEO agency so they can handle your SEO while you can focus on serving the customers. But if you still wish to handle your local SEO services yourself, there’s no one stopping you.

Contact us now and get started with your local SEO journey!