Google Snack Pack displays the top 3 local business listings for relevant searches. If you are a local business, such as a store, restaurant, or agency, you want your websites to have a high value for certain searches carried out by a local audience.
If you have a store or a service in the area, local SEO can help your audience find you when they search online. By following local SEO best practices, companies can improve organic traffic and the searches conducted by customers in the vicinity.
While national SEO focuses on being at the forefront of search across the country, local SEO prioritizes appearing in SERPs for specific sites. While SEO focuses on getting high rankings for your websites when searching, there is also a local component for local SEO that targets high rankings in specific areas, such as cities and regions. When you optimize local search and focus on telling Google what kind of signals your business has in a particular area, you will be more apt to attract customers in that region.
For local SEO, businesses often use signals such as local content, social profiles, page links, and quotations to position their products and services for local prospects and customers seeking them. It not only helps your local audience find your company name, address, and phone number in online business directories, but it can work to improve your local SEO ranking in search engine listings. Mentions in directory listings such as those on Google My Business are a key component of local SEO that can increase the visibility of your search presence.
People search for local businesses using a variety of search engines such as Google, Bing, Yelp, and Apple Maps. According to Think Google, consumers are using their phones to search local businesses for information. When someone does a local search for a dentist, a car wash, or a key service, Google shows local businesses relevant to their location.
Local SEO is a search engine optimization process that improves the visibility of search engines for local businesses with stationary locations. Local SEO involves optimizing a business website for local searches and optimizing your Google My Business page. With local SEO-optimizing content, your business appears on local search engine results in pages (SERPs) higher than your local competitors.
The most important ranking criteria in the case of local SEO are things like listing consistency, ratings, quantity and quality, regular listings updates, business owner ratings, response times, updates, high-quality photos, user location relative to listing location, etc.
It is important to note that SEO tools focusing on local search can help you develop locally-oriented SEO audits, develop keyword searches that focus on your local audience, create quotations, manage Google My Business listings, business profiles, and Google posts, and monitor your inclusion in the local package. To report on the impact of your local SEO strategy, you can use free tools such as Google Analytics to track page traffic and match it with sources such as social media, GMB posts, Google, and My Business Insights to see how you are detected by local search and how that impacts call-to-directory requests.
To this end, this comprehensive guide includes local SEO tips so that you gain a more in-depth understanding of how to improve your business online to reach potential consumers who use local search to choose what products and services they want to buy. We can show you what local SEO is, how to create an effective local SEO strategy, and show you concrete actions that you can take to improve your local search ranking. It’s all about finding local search signals, local backlinks, localized content, and consistent Google My Business reviews.
Google My Business has become the crème de la creme of local search because Google is comfortable sharing content, supporting and verifying it and it has the tools to help you meet your needs. While social media does not affect your local SEO, the right actions can help to send location signals to Google and other search engines to boost your visibility. Although search engines have a smaller market share than Google, they still have ways to help local customers find their business.
If users can’t find the information they are looking for on their own or slow loading times cause too much of an imposition, Google will not display your site in the local search results. This is because of platforms such as Google My Business, where search results are closely linked to the structure and content of the site itself. The exception is when Google returns local businesses because local searches prevail, such as hotel search results, or when it returns booking websites in organic search results.
The annual local search factor survey, which brings together the world’s 35-40 leading experts in local SEO results, provides a good insight into the factors that influence the visibility of local search. Google My Business signals include proximity and keywords, and these can help local businesses rank higher in Google’s triad.
