Local SEO is the practice of increasing the visibility of your brick-and-motor or office locations within the search engines. Local SEO is a very critical strategy to drive new customers to your locations. Think of the Google Maps listing when you search for “Car Wash Near Me” and how you scroll through the results searching for a car was close to you with good reviews, this is Local SEO.
The Benefits of Local SEO
Local SEO is also crucial for restaurants, for example, the local pizza shops who are all competing for your delivery business, or even the local contractor who services your area. If these businesses do not appear within the search results when local customers are looking for their services, then they are relying on word of mouth, referrals, or foot traffic to drive their business. And while this may work for some businesses, in today’s day in ages, businesses must increase their local SEO visibility so they can drive new users to their business.
What Does Local SEO Consist Of?
Local SEO consists of a series of optimizations with the intent of increasing your search engine visibility for the local area you service. Increasing the business visibility on Google Maps is generally the main goal of many clients, but local SEO can also consist of building business profiles on reputable business directories like Manta.com, Google My Business, or Bing Places.
These types of listings help the business by not only increasing the number of websites with your business’s information but also by linking from those directories back to your website in order to increase your website’s domain authority. Increasing your business’s domain authority increases the website’s likelihood to outrank competitors for targeted keywords. Depending on the size of your competitor’s web presence, you may be able to quickly outrank some of the smaller businesses.
Why Work with a Local SEO Agency?
Although it may seem like an easy job to make some profiles on directory websites, working with a local SEO agency can greatly increase the likelihood of your success. To be honest, there are thousands of directory websites on the internet and many of them will not help your websites local SEO. You don’t want to waste your time on the wrong websites and gathering useless links back to your website. In addition, there are more strategies for local SEO than building citations. Citations are a great start, but many businesses target multiple areas but don’t have addresses in every city they would like to target.
This is where an SEO agency can step in a build a strategy around developing location-based landing pages designed to target location-based keywords. Location-based organic landing pages are a great way to build a presence in locations where you may not have an office or store, but you’d still like to drive traffic from those areas. This strategy is also popular with online businesses who’d like to rank locally but might not have a storefront.
To Sum It All Up
Local SEO is an essential practice for a local business trying to gain a presence in a certain geographic location. From businesses with storefronts to online websites trying to rank in a certain location, local SEO will help you increase your website traffic in those locations.
For more information on local SEO or to begin working with a local SEO agency, please reach out by filling out the Free Consultation form in the top right corner!
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