What is local SEO and how does it work ?

Local SEO is a marketing technique that helps local businesses improve their visibility in Google's local search results. This is done by businesses that want to find customers in the local area more easily online. If you plan to sell products or services to customers in a specific town or city, you need to be familiar with local search marketing. Any business that has a physical location or serves a geographic area can benefit from local SEO. If you search Google for any important keyword related to your business and see a map with 3 listings below it also known as a map pack, local SEO can help you to grow your business.

Local search is powerful for small businesses, 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information. If your business isn't optimized for local search, you could be missing out on potential customers ready to buy in your area. In short, local SEO is important if you want your business to stay relevant. Local search is an integral part of any SEO strategy targeting customers in a specific region, city or neighborhood. Local SEO includes everything from claiming a business listing to making sure a franchise location appears in a local search on Google this process known as location data or citation management. It also extends to managing online ratings and reviews, local-focused social media engagement and beyond.

One of the most important things on your website is proper LocalBusiness Schema markup that will help you to explain to Google that you are a local business and what area you serve. Simply put, Local SEO is where you focus to improve your ranking and visibility in local search results such as Google's local pack. It might sound technical, but luckily, our local SEO company in pune can take care of it perfectly. In addition to technically optimizing your website for local searches, it's a good idea to write your website specifically for a local audience. Organic SEO is how you improve a webpage's ranking in organic searches. How your website ranks in those organic results can also positively impact your local pack ranking. Organic listings are another great opportunity for your local business to appear in front of searchers, when Google determines that the query has local intent.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is the process of optimizing your website for a specific local area. Local SEO is a marketing technique that helps local businesses to improve their visibility in Google's local search results. This is done by businesses that want to find customers in the local area more easily online. If you plan to sell products or services to customers in a specific town or city, you need to be familiar with local search marketing. If you own a local business, such as a shop, restaurant or agency, you want your web pages to rank for specific search queries made by a local audience. Optimizing your local business website means making sure people can find you online and offline. Even now, when you're not getting visitors to your building, you're still targeting an audience in the same geographic area. So you will better optimize your online presence for that area. You can do that to some extent on your own website, but you can do a lot more. Local SEO is a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that helps your business become more visible in local search results on Google.

However, marketers can use more specific strategies that may be necessary for better results. Local SEO enables a business to stand out in the local search results of search engines like Google. It helps your business to target customers in a precise geographic location or neighborhood. Local SEO is the process of optimizing a business, product or service for location-specific search queries. Google and other search engines use the user's location based on IP address for desktop and geolocation for mobile to determine which results to show the user. So when someone does a local search for a dentist, car wash the search engine will display local businesses related to their location. Furthermore, Google has updated its algorithm to calculate the distance of each business from the user's location, which shows them the closest company to them.

Why local SEO is important ?

One of the biggest benefits of using local SEO is to increase traffic to your website and specific webpages. Local website traffic can optimize your website's visibility, directly increase your sales, and make your brand name more recognizable to local audiences. As a local business owner, you may think that investing time and money into optimizing your Google presence doesn't make sense when you're aiming for top-tier rankings against the likes of Walmart and Amazon. That may be true for the main organic listings but not for local search. This is especially useful for small, local businesses looking to advertise their business within a small geographic area. While the basics of general SEO can help generate more website traffic, local SEO helps to generate more calls, contacts, store visits and sales. General SEO is great for creating more awareness for your brand and your business online. It does this by ensuring that you appear at the top of search results when someone searches for a topic or keyword related to your business.The problem is that general SEO will attract all website traffic to your business regardless of geographic relevance. If you write a great blog article that goes viral, the bulk of the traffic will be worldwide. It's nice to have, but it won't make more sales for a local business. Whether you have a physical brick-and-mortar location or serve a specific geographic area, local SEO allows you to better connect with people in your neighborhood, town, or city. This is significant given that 81% of consumers now turn to Google to evaluate local businesses.

Local advertising is extremely beneficial for any business. In a way, local SEO is a form of local advertising that connects customers to your website at no cost. Local SEO allows you to place important information about your site online, such as your business address and phone number. Additionally, you can highlight and promote the type of products or services you offer on your website using SEO techniques. It helps to increase your business exposure on the web, making your business better known to local residents. Since local SEO costs nothing to implement, it is considered a free and effective form of online advertising. Below are some important points that will help you understand why local SEO is important.

1. Better online visibility

Local SEO activities, such as citations and link building, increase your online visibility. It makes your business easily discoverable by new customers. Even if you don't invest in local SEO, you can be sure that there are other local businesses in your niche. This means they are one step ahead by default and they are getting all your potential customers. Being the best and most innovative business in your niche won't do you any good if no one can find you. When all these other businesses show up on the first page of local results, they take control & your online visibility increases. To test this, place your business location in Google along with your local area.

2. Local searches lead to sales

Consumers are known to use online reviews to help make decisions when choosing a local business. So many people are doing local searches to find businesses near you, but the true value of local SEO goes much deeper. The truth is that local searches are coming from people who are likely to generate more sales for your business. Once you find the business you want, you either walk into their store or call them to book an appointment for their service. This is the power of local searches. They represent people who are actively shopping for what your business is selling.

A study shows that 78% of local searches on mobile devices lead to offline purchases. According to another study, 88% of people who search for a local business on a smartphone will call or physically visit the store within 24 hours. If you've ever searched for a local business near you via Google, consider your mindset. You're looking for local businesses near you because you want something and you're an active shopper. So local search results help you to get better sales and increase your popularity.

3. People prefer local shopping

While it's true that mega corporations are more successful, even in small towns, than small local businesses, that doesn't mean people aren't interested in supporting their local business owners. More and more people are turning to local businesses to show their support and boost their local economy. As people become more critical of big-box stores and online powerhouses, they want to contribute their money where it will make the most difference. By establishing yourself as a local business and driving more online traffic your way, you'll find out how many local customers are interested in bringing you up.

4. Local SEO will give you a competitive edge

Digital marketing and SEO have become highly competitive, as more and more businesses are realizing its potential and trying to gain an edge over their competition. However, local SEO is still something that many businesses have yet to master. This means it won't be so difficult to outrank your local competitors in local searches to get all that business. In fact, only 44% of businesses claim their Google My Business listing is one of the first steps in any local SEO optimization checklist. This is why local SEO is so important for businesses. Local searches are growing at a higher rate and leading to more sales. By focusing on optimizing your local SEO rankings, you can gain a huge competitive edge in your market.

5. It’s Inexpensive

When you invest in good SEO and digital marketing services, there are costs involved. Bearing this in mind, however, those costs are associated with long-term consequences. Comparatively, local SEO is an inexpensive way to advertise your business. Local SEO also makes you more competitive because it encourages you to study what your competitors are doing well and what tactics are working for them to integrate into your own approach. When you have good SEO on your website, it doesn't go away. You will have to maintain that SEO and boost yourself up the ladder, but you will always have an SEO friendly website with no recurring costs other than marketing assistants. With other methods of marketing, this is not true. If you want to advertise in the paper or on the radio, you will have to pay a lot of money. If you choose PPC (Pay Per Click), you have to keep paying to stay on the first page but you don't have to pay the same for local search. 

How does local SEO work ?

When the internet was introduced, there were relatively few websites. However, soon many websites were launched and the Internet began to expand. Search engines were created to allow people to find sites more easily. When a user types something into Google, for example, 'how to earn money?  the search engine searches the ranking factors to find the most relevant websites for your search. The intent is to help users to find sites that match their search. However, many people don't know that Google searches through archived copies of these sites found by 'spiders'. You can also rank in local organic results even if your business is not in that physical location. So your business will not appear in the map pack, but may still appear under it as long as your website includes local keywords and unique content for that location.

Spiders are programmed bots that crawl through websites and copy all their information to the index. To build this index, each spider starts at a page on a website and follows any links found on that page. After copying the content on that page, it moves to the next link and so on. Every website copied is stored on Google's servers and can be accessed by users almost instantly. Local SEO is a two-part game as Google displays two types of search results for local searches. These are the "Map Pack" results and the organic "Blue Link" results. You can rank on both of them.

1. Managing and optimizing your business profile

Setting up a business profile is an important part of any successful local SEO strategy. If a business has not claimed its free business profile, it will be impossible to feature in Local Pack, Local Finder or Google Maps. Before we get into the strategies, let's make sure we're on the same page about what an optimized business profile looks like and why you need one. To help you visualize what you're trying to achieve and why, let's take a look at mockups of complete and optimized incomplete Google Business Profiles. After setting up a profile, initial optimization tasks, such as adding a photo and writing a keyword optimized business description, must be completed. Here, Carl's Google Business Profile is a small box, but Ernie's Business Profile will show more as you scroll. This figure does not cover all the features of an optimized Google Business Profile, but it gives you an idea of how  attractive an optimized profile is.

Google Business profile setting account is a great first step to getting clicks, driving traffic from local searches, and increasing your visibility on Google Maps. Google Business Platform is essential for local SEO success. In fact, 46% of all searches on Google result in local intent and 78% of local searches result in offline purchases optimizing your listings may take some time, but the rewards are worth your time and effort. There are things you can do to increase the effectiveness of your Google business profile listing.

2. Developing Reputation

As we've just seen, reputation management is a key component of a strong local SEO strategy. This is achieved by getting great reviews and expressing your brand personality online, such as through your social media activity and email marketing. When it comes to getting reviews, it starts with consistently providing excellent customer service. If you know you really don't deserve five star reviews, then you shouldn't expect them!

The example below shows google reviews for a cafe in pune. We can see that good service has led customers to leave glowing reviews. Additionally, in the first review, the customer mentioned that they visited the cafe because it already had very good reviews on TripAdvisor, proving that positive reviews can easily reach more customers. Your social media and email marketing activities also increase your brand reputation. Make sure that your brand and your message are always front and center and that you maintain a professional yet friendly tone when interacting with your online community.

3. Building Local Citations

Local citations include mentions of your business name, address, phone number, and website on third-party sites such as review platforms and business directories. In addition to helping Google verify certain details about your business, you can also get potentially profitable backlinks to further increase your local search engine visibility. Local citations bring more traffic to your business. As you can see in the image below, these listings provide a lot of useful information, such as reviews, driving directions, opening hours and images. This helps the business create a more comprehensive profile and helps the searcher find the best fit. 

4. Gives Positive User Experience

Providing a positive user experience should be at the heart of everything you do on your local business. It's not just beneficial for your local SEO campaign. If someone can't find what they're looking for on your site because the layout is confusing, for example, it's almost certain that they'll go back to the search results and visit a competitor instead.

5. Local Link Building

Link building is one of the most important ranking factors for local SEO. This helps search engines understand the local relevance of the business, while also demonstrating the value of link generated content. To start building local links, it's important to prioritize creating good quality content, check where your competitors are getting them from, reach out to other nearby businesses, and build local citations.

Conclusion

Local SEO involves many technical, on-page and off-page activities that take some getting used to. If you are just starting out, it is best to seek the help of skilled professionals whom you can hire as part of an in-house team or contact us for local SEO services. This guide to local SEO should have helped you to get a clear picture of what it is, how it works. Local SEO is an often overlooked digital marketing tool. Local SEO is just as important as traditional SEO. Ranking in Google Maps and local packs can help to increase your footfall and online traffic. These fantastic suggestions, like website optimization and Google Maps ranking can help you to grow your business needs. 

By leveraging some of the unique ranking signals mentioned above, you should create an ecosystem for your business's digital footprint. While many factors affect how well your business does in the online space, don't get overwhelmed and give local SEO a pause in the early stages of growing your business. Remember that this is an ongoing process that requires you to adapt to changes made by Google and the industry. If you are still new to the world of local SEO, you should try to optimize your business in each area with special and focused attention. This will help you to effectively serve users and potential customers in your neighborhood or city and help your business grow successfully. You can call us on 9922991028 to know more about local SEO or get details about SEO services in pune.