Local SEO meaning
Much like regular SEO, local SEO is a series of actions and strategies designed to improve your visibility on Google and other search engines when people close to your physical location perform a search.
While it might sound complicated, at its core, SEO is just another name for practices that improve sales through building online visibility. You do this by appealing to consumers in the right way while playing the search engines’ games by creating content using relevant keywords. In the case of local SEO, this may be including your town or city name and post code, building links and accruing reviews.
As the name suggests, local SEO focuses on attracting customers in smaller areas such as those in a particular town or city. It’s usually practiced by local businesses who generally aim to reach this audience to drive footfall to their physical location or develop business within a service area.
It often focuses on improving visibility on Google Maps and in the local 3-pack of SERPs—these parts of the search engine results pages give local consumers results specific to their local area, or within a certain distance from their physical location.
There are three key elements to ranking in the local pack: proximity, relevance and prominence. You can employ a local SEO company or agency to help you with local pack ranking or go it alone, but either way you should notice a gradual increase in local SEO conversions as you ramp up activity.
What are the benefits of local SEO?
- Local SEO activity, such as citation building, helps build online visibility
- Greater local visibility means more foot traffic, more service customers and more sales
- Optimizing your site for local search delivers more targeted traffic and more traffic for relevant search terms
- Google My Business optimization can lead to enhanced Google Maps visibility
- Content marketing and link building will improve relevance
- Reputation management builds trust in your business (prominence) which can drive increased traffic and generate more sales
These key benefits of local SEO can all make a positive impact on your bottom line—the good news is that you’ll unlock them all simply by conducting local search optimization activities.