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.

local seo imagery showcasing local map pack on Google

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.

Are you struggling to get sales or calls? Enter your website address to receive a free SEO report.

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Andrew North

2023-11-30

Falcon is an amazing company to work with. They understood our needs straight away and delivered an excellent website. We benefited from the charity scheme. It's great, and it demonstrates the ethos of Falcon.

Rosie O’Neill

2023-11-13

A massive massive thank you to Charlie and the team from everyone at The Meadowside Charity!!! We really appreciate you doing a full overhaul and providing us with a wonderful new website!!! Thank you so much!❤️⭐️ would 100% recommend

Maureen Frost

2023-09-07

I have been working with the team at Falcon Digital on the ongoing development of the Devon Women in Business website. Charlie has developed a great site, finding ways to overcome obstacles to ensure that all of our directory, membership and event booking functions are working smoothly. If you need a new website or your existing one is in need of a revamp then give Falcon Digital a try

Anton Perrins

2023-08-09

Charlie and his team are a great bunch, previous web guys were a disaster and Charlie and his team did everything they could to sort out the mess of a website I was built. There has been a few ups and downs but to be honest that’s mainly on my part as we had such a bad experience with the last guy, but charlie stuck with us even though I have given him some headaches. He has done a great job and continues to maintain our site.

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2023-05-24

We didn't envisage a new website would make such a difference. Thanks to Charlie and his team our footfall has quadrupled to the point that we have had to hire extra staff to cover the increase in sales. the impact on our support side has also expanded with more Businesses onboarding. Only headache is that we will have to plan more recruitment interviews going forward.

Sabrina

2023-05-24

Huge thanks to the guys at Falcon Digital for re-designing a website for us and sorting out our SEO! The whole page looks incredible and we have had some amazing feedback from our clients on it. The support and help we have had from Charlie and Evi has been amazing. Could not reccomend them enough!!

Louise and Maureen.

2023-04-05

Falcon Digital are Platinum Sponsors of Devon Women in Business and developed our website from scratch. We're delighted with the results and enjoy working with Charlie and the team. Highly recommended.

Adam Wiles

2023-03-29

Knowledgable and friendly team who approached us with an amazing website re-design. Very professional work and approachable. Pleasantly surprised to also see how affordable they are. Will certainly be the company we use for all web design and advertising going forwards!