If your location plays a significant role in your business and you’re looking for an effective marketing strategy that will let you target your specific area, then local SEO is what you need. If you aren’t a marketing professional yourself, however, you may wonder why this aspect of marketing is so important and how you can integrate it into your own practices.
Whether you’re a marketer or a business owner, here’s what you need to know about local SEO:
Local SEO
Local SEO is an aspect of search engine optimization that helps businesses appear as responses to queries made by users in their specific area. This type of SEO marketing involves the utilization of Google Maps, Google My Business (GMB), citations, reviews, and many more.
The Importance of Local SEO
Local SEO allows businesses to serve local communities. In fact, even huge companies can benefit from it as the strategy allows them to penetrate a local market, which in turn can give the company more exposure in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Additionally, local SEO is useful for businesses that are trying to test a product or service in a specific geographic market. Doing so increases the business’s potential to gain sales quickly and to see how the audience in particular locations respond to the product or service.
How to Use Local SEO
Although using local SEO for your business is not rocket science, it isn’t also a walk in the park. Before you take the plunge into this type of SEO, there are so many aspects that you need to know first. From there, you can start to familiarize yourself with the principles of its local counterpart.
There are three principles of local SEO:
- Proximity
- Relevance
- Prominence
Proximity involves the distance between your business’s physical store and the user who searches for your product or service. In local SEO, proximity is the top-ranking factor.
Relevance is about how important your business is to the search queries that the search engine receives. Prominence is a business working on their brand and credibility online through reviews, links, citations, and content.
Having a team to focus on optimizing local SEO is crucial to the success of your campaigns.
Local SEO Campaign
A local SEO campaign includes making sure the correct NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) details are consistent with all the business’s online properties. Search engines, like Google, consider a business’ NAP as a strong indicator that the company is committed to a specific local area it’s targeting.
Furthermore, a local SEO campaign involves the creation and optimization of a GMB business page. Know that a GMB is integrated with Google Maps and other Google features that allow potential clients to locate the business and confirm its credibility. Taking the time to optimize your GMB page, including creating content for your GMB page, will have a significant impact on your campaigns.
Reviews and online citations are vital as well to ensure a robust local SEO campaign. Making sure that your website is fully-optimized for mobile will also be helpful so that you can effectively reach out to various mobile users.
If you’re planning to target local areas for your business, then you will not go wrong with an effective local SEO campaign. With a proper strategy in place, your business will flourish, and you will gain more customers in the long run.
We’re a local SEO agency in Tampa, get in touch with us today to see how we can help you.