Local SEO
Published: 11th September 2023
What is local SEO?
Local SEO (search engine optimisation) is the practice of optimising your website for a specific local area. By doing this, you are increasing the local traffic, visibility, and brand awareness for your business. Any business with a physical location can benefit from local SEO. Search engines like Google rely on signals such as local content, social media profile pages, links, and citations to provide users with the most relevant information for local searches. By using local SEO, you are increasing your business’ visibility for these searches.
Common local SEO tasks can include:
- Optimising your Google My Business profile
- Finding local keywords
- Creating locally relevant content
- Local business schema structured data
Why is Local SEO important?
Local SEO is essential for reaching customers local to your business. 86% of people rely on the internet to find a local business. Without local SEO your business will not be visible on searches performed by customers in nearby areas. This will decrease the visibility of your website and local customers.
How does Local SEO work?
Google’s local search algorithms use three main factors to help find the best match. These factors include relevancy, distance, and prominence.
Relevancy measures how closely related a Google My Business profile result is to the words a searcher uses in their query.
Distance is how far Google believes a user is from a business they searched.
Prominence is how important Google believes a business is to any potential customers.
These factors help the user find the best match for their search. Google will then display organic results and a local pack. A local pack is a map that will display the top local business listings as well as a map. This will allow your business to reach local customers.
Even if a user’s search is not explicitly local, Google may display local results if it believes the search was intended locally.
How can we help your local SEO?
At Falcon Digital, we can help create a strategy to improve your business’ local SEO. By doing this we can help increase your local rankings and boost traffic. One of the first ways we can improve your local SEO is by generating and optimising a Google My Business profile. This is a free business listing with information about your business. Here, you can add details about your business such as location, services, products, and photos. Google can then list this in local search results.
According to Google, optimising your business profile is one of the most important tasks to improve your local SEO. By setting detailed business hours, selecting various attributes to describe your business, and uploading photos and videos regularly you can optimise your business profile. Creating a business profile on Google can boost visibility and engagement for your business. This also encourages customers to leave reviews which in return will help Google know you are a legitimate business.
By creating a location page or section on your website, you can also create further improvements to your local SEO. This page will include your business address and a Google map pinning your location. By doing this, you can potentially reach local customers. Another crucial factor in improving your local SEO involves ensuring your name, phone number, and address are located in the HTML text of your website.
Search engine bots will systematically discover content on a website, including text, images, videos, or other file types that are accessible to bots. The bots analyse the content of a page looking for links to the next pages to fetch and index. This process is known as crawling which is the first part of having a search engine recognise your page and show it in results. Once your page is crawled, Google bots can then gather information for search results. It is also important to check your and your business’ contact information is consistent across all your platforms.
Local SEO is essential for reaching customers local to your business. By using local SEO, you can improve your business’ visibility, local traffic, and brand awareness.
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