Benefits of Local SEO

The main benefit of Local SEO is that it will help your business stand out from your competition in the areas of your business services. 90% of all users on Google find the answer to their search queries on the first page of Google, and the majority of that 90% find it within the first three organic results. Therein lies the benefit of finding a quality and professional SEO agency to help you with your search strategy. Now, to explain a little bit more about the benefit and the idea of what local search is.

What Is Local SEO

Local SEO is just a search campaign focused on the areas local to a specific business. This type of SEO focuses on the areas serviced by a business and works towards ranking that business for the most relevant and profitable keywords. All search engine optimization requires a specific and custom strategy to help the business rank. When an SEO crafts a search strategy for a business, many different factors are taken into consideration. Anything from the areas the business services, which terms get the highest search volume in those areas, what keywords make the most sense for the client's desired demographic, etc.

You might be wondering, "How does local SEO work?" and that's what we plan to cover in this article. We'll walk through not only why search optimization is important but also why it's important for small businesses. We will then give you a few hacks on improving your ranking potential.

Why Is Local SEO Important

So to answer this question, we must first understand who needs to invest in search optimization in the first place. So, quite simply, some businesses don't need to optimize their content for search. Government agencies, for example. They have no competition, so SEO would not benefit them due to their imposed monopoly. Businesses serving areas with extremely low competition don't really require SEO either. Businesses that fulfill large contracts for a small amount of very stable clientele do not need SEO. Businesses like this especially do not need SEO if they do not want to grow much more than they already have.

However, suppose you are not a business like any listed above. In that case, you will benefit significantly from investing some of your profits into a marketing budget through your rankings. Search engine optimization for small businesses is perhaps the best marketing investment you can make. SEO for businesses of any size is an excellent marketing investment. Later on, in this article, we will share some hacks on how to improve your optimizations even further.

Why Is Local SEO Important For Small Businesses

There is no doubt that search engine optimization is incredibly powerful for a small business. Local search helps out small businesses because of the nature of their competition. They are competing directly with other local businesses, and the best way to pull ahead of the competition is by pulling ahead in the search results. 

When was the last time you needed a car repair and found your mechanic on the sixth page of Google? It never happens. You probably found him on the first page and probably more towards the top of the page. In today's market, most people unconsciously attribute trust and quality to a higher Google ranking, so investing in that for your business will impart those qualities to your business. 

In the next section, we will walk through a few optimization hacks, but before we do, we will explain how search engine optimization works for small businesses. SEO benefits small businesses by ranking them higher for their industry's most profitable and relevant keywords. There are many different techniques and aspects to SEO, especially local SEO. All of which are vital to the success of your SEO campaign. This type of search engine optimization ensures that a business will get more organic and relevant traffic to its website. This means that if their website is optimized and structured correctly, this will lead to more sales and revenue. 

Local SEO Hacks

GMB (Google My Business). 

You want to ensure that your Google my business profile is filled with relevant and current information. GMB is a basic but essential part of your search strategy. It is excellent, especially if your business has a physical location. Without it, you will have difficulty ranking in the map pack part of the local search.

NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number).

You want to ensure that everywhere your business is mentioned, the business's name, the business address, and the business's phone number are identical. NAP is critical to Google determining your relevance in search and therefore is one of the most basic and vital aspects of search engine optimization.

Optimized H1 Tag

As a business owner, you know what keywords you want to rank for, so make sure that you contain those in your H1 heading. Once you have determined which keywords make the most sense for the areas that your business services, use them. We will write an article about the most important places to use these keywords in the future, so stay tuned for that! 

Google looks at your H1 tag to find out what your website is about. If your H1 tag says, "Get your life back!" while to humans, that reads well, and we can understand the context of that statement, Google cannot. For example, let's say you are a chiropractor that serves Dallas, Texas. Google thinks that the website is about getting your life back, which doesn't help the chiropractor in this example at all. They are ranking for getting your life back together instead of chiropractic care—an entirely different demographic.

So to remain true to this example, a better H1 tag would be "Best Chiropractor in Dallas since 2015 and counting!". This H1 would be a much better H1 to have. You are a Chiropractor in Dallas, and it will index and rank you accordingly. It tells Google exactly what it needs to know. You are telling both Google and your visitors exactly who you are, what area you service, and the service you offer. Local search is about structuring your content so that what you offer and who you are offering it to is unmistakable.

Conclusion

Local search has been proven to be one of the most profitable forms of marketing a business has at its disposal. Local SEO benefits businesses by putting their website in front of their target demographic, driving more relevant leads to their website. Check out our blog if you are interested in investing in local SEO. We have a few articles walking you through things like whether or not you can pay Google for search engine optimization, how to find the perfect search engine optimization expert for your business, and even an article showing you the best practices for H1 tags. If you want to up your SEO game, an excellent place to start is right here!