Understanding Local SEO: What it is and Why Your Business Needs It
Search engine optimization or SEO is a term that you will hear about time and time again in the world of digital marketing. There’s a good reason for this, as SEO is the cornerstone of achieving success online through your marketing campaigns. However, one term you may be less familiar with is local SEO. Keep reading to find out more about what local search engine optimization and local search actually mean, and how they could benefit your business.
What is Local SEO?
Local search engine optimization refers to a type of digital marketing effort that aims to help businesses appear in local Google search results. This targeted form of digital marketing usually uses unpaid methods to achieve its results, making it ideal for companies that don’t want to invest in expensive campaign strategies.
Local SEO is best suited to businesses that have a physical presence. For example, a service provider, such as an insurance broker or real estate agent, that has a customer-facing office on a local shopping street. Local SEO is also a perfect marketing strategy to employ for bricks and mortar stores and restaurants looking to increase their footfall. Local SEO can be a really effective way for these stores to build their presence in the local community and encourage trade from customers in their physical area.
Local SEO Marketing Aims
Local SEO marketing activities are varied and all center around a few key goals. These are:
- Improve Google rankings in local search results.
- Enhance Google ranking based on location-specific keywords.
- Rank above local competing businesses.
When you focus your local SEO activities around these goals, you should start to notice that your business begins to attract more customers within your local area, additional Google reviews from local customers start to appear, you begin to see returning customers based within the local area.
Local SEO Marketing Activities
As you can see, working on your local SEO strategy can be a valuable marketing tool to help your business gain the attention it deserves within the local area and among your local target audience. This is especially important for businesses with a physical presence in the local area. However, improving local SEO can be time-consuming, and requires consistent effort to be effective. For this reason, many companies choose to outsource local SEO marketing activities to a digital marketing company with expert local SEO knowledge, such as https://armoryseo.com/.
A digital marketing company that specializes in local SEO will implement a tailored approach to your marketing to achieve the best local results. This involves the following:
- Carrying out local keyword research to better understand how to improve search results.
- Improving on-page SEO on your website to include local keywords, introducing meta descriptions and meta tags.
- Enhancing your Google Business Profile to ensure it is complete and provides the information customers need to find your business.
- Monitor how your website performs in Google search results on a local level.
A combination of these activities should help your business achieve local success.
