Local SEO Services

What is Local SEO?

As we’ve already mentioned, local SEO is the process of optimizing your website and planning both off-site and on-site strategies to increase your page visibility in the local organic search results for location-specific queries.

Local SEO usually comes to the rescue of businesses that have a physical location. These include restaurants, bars, clinics, pet services, law offices, chain stores, or any other service or product providers that operate in a given city or region.

What are the  Benefits of Local SEO?

With local SEO, you can increase your visibility in the organic search results for long-tail, location-specific keywords. This way, people who search for given services or products in their area come across your brand.

Making sure that your listing in Google is appealing will give you the opportunity to stand out and get local customers.

What are the Other Benefits of Local SEO?

• high positions in the search results for local searches – if you operate in a highly competitive industry, it might be infeasible for you to compete with tycoons in your sector. However, optimizing your website and listings for local, specific, and long tail keywords gives you a chance to rank higher for these phrases and reach potential customers who are determined to finalize transactions.
• increased web traffic and more leads – higher positions for local keywords and an active Google My Business listing is a great way to attract more website visitors. If your business is shown both in Google Maps and in the search results, the chances are that people will visit your website, and choose your offer if it appeals to them.
• better conversion rates – even though optimizing your website for specific long tail and local keywords means that you may reach fewer recipients, the truth is that people who enter such queries into Google are far more likely to make a purchase (if you run a store), book a room (if you’re a hotel owner), or visit your venue (if you have a restaurant or other type of a local business). Approximately 28% of local searches end with a purchase. This means that a well-thought-out local SEO strategy can help you improve your traffic, and conversion rate.
• higher revenue – did you know that even 72% of potential customers who search for a local business decide to visit a venue that is located a maximum 5 miles away from their current location? If you’re within these 5 miles, yet your business isn’t displayed in the local search results, you’ll miss the boat.
• better brand awareness and recognition – even if potential customers don’t choose your listing the first time they come across it in Google Maps or local search results, they’ll learn that your company exists. Improving your brand awareness and recognition is crucial, because the next time someone is looking for a local restaurant or a hotel, they may remember your business, attractive photos, and prices. Consequently, they’ll choose your offer right away.
• more loyal local customers – approximately 56% of local companies haven’t claimed their GMB listings. This means that doing it gives you a competitive edge over half of your market rivals. Why do we think so? Because poorly developed Google My Business listings don’t inspire trust. Consequently, potential customers who come across them in the search results will probably choose the offers of businesses that provide photos, reviews, links, prices, directions, and more.
• lower advertising costs – local SEO doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. In fact, it’s one of the most efficient ways to reach high positions in the organic search results. Although optimizing your website and managing business information in GMB listings and other directories is time-consuming, it can be done for free and brings outstanding results. This makes local SEO a cost-effective online advertising solution.

How Does  Local SEO Work

Are you wondering how local SEO works? Unsurprisingly, there are a few important factors that determine the positions in the local search results. Therefore, if you want to boost your rankings, you should focus on the following elements:

• Google My Business
• Google My Business Categories
• The proximity of Address to Point of Search
• Physical Address in City of Search
• Reviews
• Links

Use them to convince Google that your website, as well as products or services, can be trusted and should be displayed to users entering related queries into the search box.

We’ll discuss each of these elements and tell you how to properly optimize your offer in the subsequent part of the article.

How to Do Local SEO <br>10 Tips to Achieve Success

If you’re planning to include local SEO in your marketing activities, here is a list of things you should keep in mind:

1. Google My Business Profile

Google My Business profile is an absolute must-have for any business that has a physical location and operates within a city or region.

GMB is a free tool that allows you to manage your business data and modify the listing displayed in the search results. Keeping your information updated, listing important products or services, taking care of photos, encouraging customers to write positive reviews and building relationships with your Google My Business community will help you rank higher in the local search results.

Want to learn more about optimizing your Google My Business listing? We have a separate guide for you!

2. Google Map Pack

Google Map Pack (also known as Local Pack) are local search results that include Google Maps listings. They’re displayed when users search for local businesses.

Let’s take the query “restaurants near me” as an example:

As you can see, after entering the query, users get not only restaurant names but also a map with highlighted locations of the best-ranked restaurants in the area.

It’s important to mention that in the case of Google Map Pack, the results are different for different locations because they’re connected to the physical location of a person who typed in the query.

Google Map Pack evaluates your content based on slightly different factors than traditional Google search results. Therefore, if you want to optimize your website for Google Map Pack, you should:

• Set up a Google My Business profile and provide all the relevant information about your local business,
• Add your business to Google Maps,
• Include photos of your services, products, or team,
• Get users’ reviews,
• Make your website mobile-friendly,
• Optimize your website for local keywords.

To monitor your business’s visibility in Google, you can use tools like Local Rank Tracker.

3. Local SEO Keywords

Local keyword research is one of the most important elements of every local SEO strategy.

As you can probably guess, in the case of local keywords, you should always remember your business location. This might be either a city (Kraków, New York, Berlin), your region (Tuscany, Bavaria), or even a country (USA, Italy, Germany).

Selecting the right local keywords is crucial to ranking high in the search results and reaching potential customers who are interested in your offer.

For keyword research, you can use available tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, and Google Trends. If you don’t want to invest in paid solutions, it’s definitely worth going through your competitors’ websites and checking related searches or suggestions displayed on Google.

Local keywords should combine 3 elements:

• modifier – a phrase that makes the keyword more specific and adds an additional value to it
• core term – the most important part of a local keyword describing your business profile
• location of your business

Therefore, the examples would include “cheap hairdresser New York”, “luxury restaurant Toronto”, or “professional web development agency UK”.

When choosing keywords for your local SEO process, you should remember about the search intent. In a nutshell, it’s what a user wants to get by typing in a given query into Google. There are 4 main types of search intent:

1. informational – users want to learn about a specific topic and understand it better,
2. navigational – users look for a specific brand or website,
3. transactional – users want to buy something or use a service,
4. commercial – users already know what they want to buy, but are looking for reviews or opinions to make a final decision.

To check the search intent of a specific query you can either type it into Google and analyze the top search results, or use special tools like SEMrush.

If you want to learn more about determining the search intent, check out our article on search intent SEO.

4. NAPs Citations

NAPs are a very powerful Google ranking factor that can take your local SEO to the next level.

The acronym stands for Name, Address, and Phone number, which are the basic contact details that allow local customers to get in touch with your business.

NAPs inform Google that your business actually exists, and helps both users and search engine robots to verify your trustworthiness. Moreover, if potential customers can’t find important information about your restaurant, hotel, or store right away, they’ll probably choose your market rivals who will give them everything on a silver platter.

If you want your NAPs to support your local SEO, you should remember to:

• complete all key information about your business: name, address, and phone number are obligatory in every NAP, however, if you have such a possibility, enter your homepage URL, email, description, logo, or images as well,
• make your NAPs consistent and reliable – always provide real data, and make sure that information in different NAPs isn’t contradictory,
• keep your NAPs updated – if you change address or phone number, update NAPs as soon as possible. Leaving your data outdated means lost traffic and revenues.

5. Schema LocalBusiness

Schema (also known as structured data) is a great solution that helps Google crawlers understand your website and provide users with necessary information. Thanks to it, users searching for specific products or services can see your prices, photos, or geolocation already in the search results. This can give you a competitive edge over your market rivals and attract more visitors to your page.

When talking about local SEO, you should definitely implement LocalBusiness schema, as it can bring tangible benefits to your company.

LocalBusiness schema should include the following elements:

• company name,
• address,
• description,
• opening hours,
• price range,
• geolocation,
• homepage URL,
• phone number,

Find out more about Schema and how to implement it!

6. Local Content

Content is an important ranking factor that supports both traditional SEO and local SEO.

56% of customers state that they search a company’s website to find accurate information about its offer. Therefore, it’s worth making sure that your page is filled with quality, diversified texts that bring value to the users. If you want to rank for local keywords, you should optimize your website for relevant phrases.

What should you do if you run a multi-location business and operate in several cities?

Consider preparing individual location-specific landing pages for each location. For example, if you want to get local visitors from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, then you should create separate landing pages with unique content for each of these cities.

A company blog is another source of quality local content. With its help, you can generate more traffic and support your local SEO.

Planning your content calendar will help you reach potential customers at all stages of the sales funnel. If you want to increase your visibility in the local search results and be displayed for more keywords, create entries related to:

• product/service announcements,
• testimonials,
• interviews,
• industry news,
• important events in the area.

If you think that the blog era is over, definitely check out our article: /company-blogs-in-2020/

7. On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization is the next step to success. When doing local SEO, you should consider certain tasks as a priority. It’s particularly important to:

• include a keyword in the H1 heading,
• add at least several H2 headings to divide and organize your content,
• make URLs short, user-friendly, and include keywords in them,
• create alt text for all your images,
• use HTML emphasis tags (<strong>, <em>) to mark keywords.
• create title tags that are between 50 and 60 characters long, are unique, describe your business profile, include your location and start with the most important keyword,
• write catchy meta descriptions that are between 140 and 160 characters, encourage users to visit your website, briefly summarize your offer, and include long tail, location-specific keywords. They can boost your CTR by 8%, the game is worth the candle!

To learn more about on-page optimization, check out our fresh 2022 On-page SEO checklist that will help you make Google love your website.

Summary

Local SEO is an efficient and effective recipe for improving your position in the organic search results and Google Maps for location-specific keywords. If you run a business that largely depends on brick-and-mortar traffic, a proper local SEO strategy will allow you to reach more potential customers at low costs.

Need help with your local SEO strategy? Consult our experts. We’ll take your traffic to the next level!