What Is Local Search Marketing?
Local search marketing, sometimes referred to as local SEO, is an effective way to market your local business online. This helps businesses promote their services and products to local customers at the same time they’re looking for them online.
Local search marketing is all about promoting physical businesses that communicate face-to-face with their customers on a daily basis.
A good local SEO is built upon a base of clear business information, using marketing practices to transform an unknown brand into a local household word.
The goal of local search marketing is to put your business on the map in local searches.
The Importance of Local Search
All the local search queries typically include a location or queries like “best pizza near me”. Search engines right away understand what a searcher wants in business suggestions or lists based on location. That’s exactly what search engines offer up in the local search results.
It’s important to master local SEO because doing this means building on a strong foundation to ultimately gain a competitive edge.
There are a couple of foundational elements that are important to be understood. Keep reading, as we are going to explain each one of them!
Guideline Compliance
Even though there are multiple search engines you can optimize for, we all know that in fact, Google owns over 90% of the market. That’s why, when we are talking about local SEO we are primarily talking about optimizing for Google.
Your Google My Business listing is one of the most important elements for local SEO. In a case, your business doesn’t have a listing on Google’s directory, you won’t show up in the local search results or on Google Maps whenever someone does a Google search for your business.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to set this listing up yourself in order for it to appear. It can also be created by Google and appear in the results in case they find your business information on any other publicly available directory.
Site Authority
You need to build your brand in order to build the authority of your site. One of the ways to do that is by earning a recommendation from other websites online.
These can come in the form of citations in online directories and links from other reputable, high-quality sites. However, beware of links from low-quality sources or schemes that attempt to inflate link count without any concern for relevance.
Site Quality
No one likes websites that are not working properly. If you have clicked the sam button for the 10th time already and nothing happened you will probably give up and just leave. Of course, you wouldn’t want this happening to your business. That is why you need a good site quality that will provide a good user- experience.
- Take care of your page speed, the faster your website loads the better.
- Remember to have an intuitive site structure and navigation.
- Your website should be free of Malware, this one should really go without saying.
- High-quality content is a must.
Site Optimization
You need to optimize your website for search engines if you want to increase the traffic your website gets from the organic search result on Google. Even though local SEO is a subset of SEO and they run on two different algorithms they still overlap.
Local SEO includes everything that regular optimization does, plus geography. In other words, local business websites also feature terms relevant to the cities they operate ib, instead of just focusing on keywords about products, services, and topics.
NAP Consistency
NAP stands for “name, address, phone number”. These three bits of data represent the core of your business information in the world of local search.
You need to make sure that your name, address, and phone number are consistent all across the web. This will help people find you but it also builds your credibility with Google.
Google doesn’t like to see a variety of contradicting information when crawling the web. It makes it harder for the algorithm to know what’s accurate and in this case, your authority drops.
Review Acquisition
Reviews are probably the most influential internet factor for any local business. It’s estimated that 93% of consumers/ customers read online reviews, and more than half of them stated that positive reviews influence their feelings of trust in a business.
You need authentic and meaningful feedback, not just positive reviews. If your online reviews look fake or are too short Google will probably ignore them.
Also, you need a strategy for encouraging customers to leave reviews on a variety of platforms since the number of reviews can impact your local search rankings.
Publishing Strategy
The moment your business steps onto the web, you become a publisher. Your job is to introduce content ( blogs, videos, text content for your website, social media, etc.) Your goal is to expose and engage them to your brand).
Search engines measure content quality and how users interact with your content. Additionally, high-quality content may be shared by your industry and consumer base, which helps your business promotion.
Local SEO, Can I Do It Myself?
A lot of business owners want to do SEO by themselves to reduce costs. An average business owner has a lot to do, adding this can be a bit too much. Still, it would be useful to learn about SEO, because this way they can easily evaluate a work someones does for them.
When it comes to mastering local SEO, it all depends on how competitive your unique industry is in your area.
Wrapping Up
As you could see it’s all about showing on the map whenever potential customers are searching for something that your business can help them with. In order, to give your business the best chance of showing up in the right searches, you’ll need to tell search engines everything they need to know.
Good local search marketing means better visibility which can lead to the growth of your business.