More than 80 percent of people who look up a business in their area will call or visit it within 24 hours.
That statistic would not mean much except that it’s in the face of local search, which has been growing by 900%. Within this context, you can discern the importance of local SEO in helping you reach such a fast-growing customer base.
Here are five essential reasons why your business needs to invest more significantly in local search engine optimization (SEO).
What’s Local SEO?
Local SEO, also known as local search marketing, is where you optimize your site to grow traffic and nurture leads from local search.
The primary aim of local search marketing is to answer the question, “Where can I find X near me?” You want to draw out organic online traffic to connect users with your business in the real world.
Core Elements That Make up Local SEO
When you’re thinking about leveraging local SEO for your business, you need to keep the three core elements in mind that make for exceptional local SEO. These are prominence, relevance, and proximity.
1. Prominence
With prominence, you assess how well your business stands out from the rest. Investing in your brand’s prominence gets the search engine to offer your brand to users at the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs).
In turn, that leads more people to your website who are already convinced you hold the right solution for them. See how that improves the odds of converting such users to paying customers?
Some of the ways you can build prominence for your brand include favorable reviews, backlinks, and citations.
2. Relevance
Any search engine seeks to match the right content to the appropriate user at the right time. For your local SEO to thrive, you need to offer the right solution to the right problem when the need arises.
There is a myriad of ways to level up your site’s relevance. You can implement local listing ideas, on-page assets, and tweaks plus off-page tactics.
3. Proximity
Local SEO is about users looking up businesses near them that they can call or visit.
So much so that several SEO professionals believe that proximity is the number one ranking factor in local search marketing.
Typically, a user will run a local search in three ways:
- Geo-modified
- Non-geo modified
- ‘Near me’
A robust local SEO strategy needs to optimize for all three proximity tactics to draw in the right traffic.
The Importance of Local SEO for Your Firm
Many businesses are flocking to local SEO without understanding its real value. Yet, it’s only when you accurately identify its importance that you can use it most effectively.
Why should local search marketing matter to you?
1. Better User Experience
Today, customer experience does not start when a client walks through your door. Instead, the customer experience you deliver begins when a user searches for what you offer online.
There are two types of customers on search engines.
The first type of client is the user that does not know your business exists in their locality, but they run into it when looking for services or products. The second type of client is aware of your business, and they go online to look your offering up
For both groups of customers, you need to make it easy for them to find what they are looking for when running a search.
Local SEO helps you optimize your content such that users can seamlessly turn to your info and visit your business.
2. Visibility
Local SEO helps you raise awareness about your business to local customers.
For example, using featured snippets, you can display more information about your business to users.
These snippets feature more comprehensive information than a traditional search engine listing, which helps draw clients in.
Keywords are also another critical tool that helps you uncover what local users are looking for. With such insight in hand, you can better position your business to draw in this traffic by offering a relevant solution at the right time.
3. Reputation Management
It’s hard for users to distinguish which businesses to trust in the search results. Local SEO helps you manage your reputation such that you can stand out to local customers.
For example, customer reviews that pop up on search results can signal to users that you’re a trustworthy business.
Given that 84% of users trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, you have a powerful means to bolster your reputation.
Citations are critical for excellent local SEO performance. When you list your business name, address, and phone number, users feel you are a credible organization.
That credibility is what makes users take a chance on visiting your business for potentially higher conversion rates.
Good backlinking also helps you build more authority, elevating your reputation both to the search engine and local customers.
4. Long Term Marketing
SEO, by its very nature, is a long term strategy. Building credibility for traffic may take longer, but the advantage is that the benefits also keep flowing for longer.
Local SEO gives you the capability to leverage evergreen content to generate traffic in your area over the long haul.
Moreover, the reputational aspects of local SEO help you establish a deeply rooted business in the local scene, which gives you staying power for longer.
Long-tail local keywords help you tap into customer sentiment over a more extended period to generate more sales.
5. More Targeted Marketing
Your business now lives in the personalization era, and unless your digital marketing follows suit, your return will be meager.
User intent on local search is typically highly targeted as they are looking for a particular type of business near them that they can visit.
Local SEO helps you hone in on a highly targeted audience for your business. The tools you can take advantage of when deploying local SEO can enable you to offer a highly personalized experience to local customers, potentially boosting your conversion rates.
Are You Ready to Stay Competitive in Your Locality?
In recent years, users have been paying more attention to local businesses to find faster solutions to their needs. As a result, local search traffic is up, and the importance of local SEO for your firm has never been greater. When you understand the direct benefits of local SEO, you will have a more precise strategy to leverage it effectively.
Evergreen is a full-service marketing agency armed with the capacity to offer personalized services for your business. Talk to us today for expert marketing advice and services.
