Local SEO and it's Importance
Mar 31, 2021
Written by Casey Bjorkdahl
Casey Bjorkdahl is one of the pioneering thought leaders in the SEO community. In 2010, Casey co-founded Vazoola after working for a Digital Marketing Agency for five years in New York City. Vazoola is now one of the fastest growing and most widely recognized SEO marketing firms in the country.
Local search engine optimization (SEO) is an important component to managing your business’s online marketing. This strategy helps your business to be more accessible and visible to people who use Google and other search engines to find the products and services you offer located near them.
Even if you are a brick-and-mortar business or you provide services in a very local area, an online presence is still critically important to your marketing strategy. If a customer needs to find a product or service in their local area, they are likely to go online to perform a search for that product or service. If they cannot quickly find your business in the search results, they will likely find your competitor.
Local SEO involves is a set of strategies that are used to help those customers to find you when searching for something in their local area. It’s a necessary marketing strategy for any business hoping to attract local customers.
What Is Local SEO?
With local SEO, the goal is to optimize your website to a specific area, such as your city, town state, zip code, or neighborhood. Restaurants, service providers, shops, doctor offices, and many others need to use this method of SEO to help ensure their website is visible in the search engines to customers performing a relevant search.
The goal is to use a series of SEO strategies and local backlinks on your website to help encourage people looking for you to find you. To do that, you have to rank well in the search engines. To do this, we use keywords targeted to your specific area, services, products, and target customers.
If most of your customers are located within a specific geographical area, you need to invest in local SEO. There are several components to this:
- Determining your targeted area and nearby areas
- Using locally focused keywords and strategies to reach your audience
- Use the proper markup on your website to target search engines and customers looking for solutions you offer
- Ensure your Google My Business account is updated using the proper insights
- Utilizing strategies on your website to reach customers local to you
Hire a Local SEO Expert for Local SEO Tips
Local SEO can be somewhat challenging depending on the size of your geographical area as well as how the competitors in the area are doing their own SEO. Hiring a local SEO expert may help to make the process of local marketing a bit more efficient and cost-effective for you.
Ranking locally requires numerous steps. It also requires understanding where you stand right now, something we can offer with an analysis of your website as well as your competitors. While you can learn local SEO on your own if you don’t have the time or the ability to wait to do so, hire our team to do the work for you instead.
What Makes for the Best Local SEO?
Use numerous strategies to attract your local customers. This may mean using keywords that contain terms such as “nearby” or “near” your location. Using the city and state terms in your content is another big step. For example, if you sell pizza, you want your website to show up when someone types “best pizza in New York City.” Some people may even include their neighborhood or zip code in online searches. The best local SEO is designed to target those specific terms, but also others that can help you get on the search engine results page.
It’s important to know what your customers are looking for when they seek out solutions you have. Your customer may be looking for the “best electrician in San Diego.” That’s another term that you want to rank for, then. Working with your SEO expert, you can build a successful SEO and content plan around terms like this.
How to Get Affordable Local SEO Services
Our team is happy to work with you to ensure you have access to affordable local SEO services. We work carefully with you to ensure all of your needs are met. A comprehensive process of analysis and building a strategy to address your local target customers is important. We’ll work closely with you to ensure that’s possible.
Local Business SEO FAQ
Do you have questions about local SEO? Unsure how to make it all work so your ranking improves? These are common questions that businesses ask when it comes to local SEO optimization.
What does local ranking mean to your business?
Working with an SEO expert, you will learn strategy and steps to take to ensure your business is ranking when someone inputs information that’s applicable to your business’s offerings. When you have this targeted SEO in place, it will help to drive customers to your website. It may help your SEO rankings, especially in your local area. This type of strategy can directly impact your bottom line. If your restaurant isn’t ranking locally, you’re missing out on patrons who are searching for what you offer. Let’s fix that.
What steps can you take to improve local search engine optimization?
The first step is to know where you stand right now. A full analysis of your SEO right now is important. The next step is to invest in identifying where your geographical customer base is. It may be further than you realize, depending on what products or services you offer. It’s also important to consider the types of phrases and keywords used in association with the products and services you offer.
What will a local SEO analysis show you?
Your analysis provides insight into what key areas of improvement are present on your website. It can provide insight into anything that is holding back your website from ranking well. It can also take a look at what your competitors may be doing that’s directly impacting your ranking.
Local SEO is a critical component of any successful ranking strategy for businesses looking to acquire more customers in their area. Let us help you determine what you can do today to bring in more customers or buyers to your site. Request a local SEO analysis today.