Imagine that your business is the very first entity your target audience thinks of any time they need a product or service similar to your offerings in your locality. Well that’s the incredible force of local SEO.
Local SEO doesn’t only focus on making your business appear in the search results. It is more about building a powerful presence in the community. One of the striking benefits of local SEO is that it helps your business stay top-of-mind of your target market.
Let’s delve deeper into this topic, and talk more about the 5 key benefits of local SEO for businesses of all shapes and sizes. But first, let’s quickly brush your knowledge on local SEO.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO is the local variant of SEO. It is exactly the same as SEO: the process of increasing your brand’s visibility in the search engine results.
What distinguishes it from local SEO is that the latter emphasizes on making your business more visible in the local searches. Once you start working on your site’s local SEO, you better optimize it for local searches.
In addition, you also build your Google Business Profile (GBP, earlier known as Google My Business-GMB.) As you start to better improve your local online presence, you better captivate local customers too.
When someone looks up ‘best burger place in Ohio’ or ‘top digital marketing agency in Santa Monica’, your business pops right in the search results. Honestly, that does more favor to your business than you can imagine. Keep reading to find the 5 golden benefits of local SEO.
What are the 5 Major Benefits of Local SEO?
76% of all the people searching for products or services nearby using their smartphones most likely visit a business place in the next 24 hours. This remarkable statistic just goes to highlight the value of local SEO.
Let’s break down the 5 most notable benefits of local SEO so you better understand it’s unimaginable force.
#1- Your Business’s Visibility Skyrockets in the Local Searches
Businesses with an optimized Google Business Profile have a 70% more likelihood to attract location visits as compared to those who don’t have GBP, or haven’t optimized it.
Once you start putting efforts in your business’s local SEO, its appearance in local search results picks up pace. Your business starts gaining more traction in Google’s Local Pack. with this placement, the chances that your potential customers find you automatically elevate.
#2- You Start Attracting Interested and Local Customers
If you offer location-centric services or products, you would need local clients. Say you provide cleaning services in Manhattan. In that case, your ideal clients would be those in Manhattan, or adjacent areas.
Local SEO helps you find and connect with your ideal audience in your area. When those searching for your respective products and services find you, they are likely to turn into your paying clients.
Using a targeted approach, local SEO brings in more foot traffic to your physical stores. With that, the online inquiries also continue to rise.
#3- You Gain More Trust and Credibility
Your leads and sales increase as you build more goodwill in the market. One of the key strategies to build great goodwill is to win your customers’ trust. Local SEO helps you do that quite easily.
One of the core strategies to improve your local SEO is to get more positive reviews. The more reviews you receive, the better your online reputation gets. Automatically, that positively influences your online rankings.
Always remember—people do rely on word-of-mouth a lot. Your happy clients refer your business to people, and your clientele continues to increase.
#4- You Find a Cost-Effective Marketing Tool for Your Business
Traditional advertising costs a lot. But when you invest time and effort in local SEO, you start reaching your ideal users at a faster rate.
By improving your local SEO, you get higher visibility in Google’s Local Pack. The more your business gets seen on Google’s platforms, the more your reach widens. You connect with seriously interested users which maximizes your ROI, and reduces the wasted efforts.
#5- You Get More Competitive Edge
Every business industry struggles with saturation nowadays. No matter how unique or distinct your niche is, you’d find at least a competitor or two in it.
Your ultimate goal is naturally to get more market share. That happens best when you get an edge over your competitors. You can easily achieve this goal by working on your local SEO.
By using more location-targeted keywords, and creating a powerful GBP, you start outranking your competitors, especially those who have yet to work on their local SEO.
As you can, local SEO does wonders for your business. That said, users often ask about the time it takes to show results. Let’s talk about that next.
How Long Does Local SEO Take?
Typically, it can take anywhere from 3 to 6 months for local SEO, and SEO in general to show results. That said, the time it takes for local SEO to get more traffic and visibility for your business does depend on some factors. These include your existing online presence, your number of views, your market competition, consistency of your marketing efforts, and your content’s quality.
If you want your local SEO to generate excellent results as soon as possible, then it is crucial for you to work on the following best practices for local SEO:
- Make sure to create and optimize your Google Business Profile.
- Your NAP (name, address and phone number) must be consistent across all the platforms.
- You need to encourage your customers to leave positive reviews.
- Have your SEO analyst incorporate location-centric keywords in your website’s content, headings and meta descriptions.
- Don’t forget to channelize the local listings such as Bing Places and Yelp.
It’s never too late to take the right step. Now that you are aware of what local SEO can do for you, start working on it now.
Final Thoughts- Pay Attention to Your Local SEO
There are myriads of people in search of a business like yours. It is basically on you if you cannot find and access your target audience. Local SEO gives you the wings to soar in search engines’ results. The higher you fly, the better you can identify and connect with your ideal audience.
Start working on your site’s local SEO by joining hands with a local SEO expert. At ITechSole, we have substantial experience in local SEO. With improved local SEO, their sales spiked too.
We would love to do the same for you. Get in touch with us today to avail our FREE SEO Audit.
FAQs
Google Reviews help local SEO, and even SEO in general a lot. The more positive Google reviews you get, the better your market reputation becomes. Moreover, positive reviews positively influence the ranking algorithms of Google. When a business has more excellent reviews, its chances of appearing in Google’s Local Pack increase
SEO focuses on improving your search results globally. On the other hand, local SEO focuses on increasing your visibility in the search engines for local searches.
Local SEO is a huge factor that can influence your business’s reputation, both online and offline. With a more concrete local SEO strategy, your business can grab more qualified traffic, leads and higher sales. With time, its market presence increases which automatically improves your growth.
