Impact of Internet and Search Engines for Local Businesses
Before the internet, anyone looking for a local trades-person, a business nearby, or even just a service provider had to use bulky business directories called Yellow pages. By listing thousands of local businesses in numerous business categories they dominated the local business search and advertising market for almost a century. With the rise of the Internet, the value of these business directories has decreased significantly.
The Internet has replaced them as a more efficient to look for local businesses. On the internet search engines like Google and Bing offer really good features to look for the best local service provider or small business to fulfill your needs and requirements. That’s why, if you own an SME/SMB or provide your services locally in your area, you must optimize your business portfolio or website to appear on top of local search listings of search engines.
What does search engine optimization mean for local businesses?
Local Search services offered by Google, Bing, and online business directories like Yelp has killed Yellow pages because with the internet good service providers and the most relevant addresses can be found easily and faster, as long as the businesses have optimized their websites and search engine listings correctly. And this is why local Search engine optimization (local SEO) becomes important. Local SEO is very important if you’re a small business with physical establishments, like a retail store, or a restaurant, or your service delivery region is limited to a particular area. Local SEO offers many benefits to your business, few of the benefits are:
• Whether, you're a plumber tradesperson, run a small locksmith business, or a big local restaurant, search engines are the primary tool for finding local businesses these days. If you appear on top of local search results, you grab the majority of customers. As there are no advertising costs associated with Search engine local search, you gain customers for free.
High ranking on Local search is an important step to building a strong profile for expansion of the expansion of your business to multiple regions nationally or internationally.
• Focus on local search means you can rank for highly competitive keywords without spending time, effort, and money on outranking large corporations.
For these and many more reasons, your website must be optimized for local and regional searches.
The ranking algorithm used by Google to determine the ranking of your business in local searches is very complex and is designed to show users the best match for the local product and services they are looking for.. Some of the important factors for achieving high rankings in Google local search are, reviews, product/services, citations on different business directories, your business description on Google my business, distance from the user’s location, and website content. These are the most important factor to outrank your local competitors.
How to Optimize your Google my business local listing:
It is very important to pay attention to the optimization of the Google My Business profile and provide Google with as much information as possible.
To best complete your card:
For best performance on Google local search results, you must optimize your Google My Business profile with up-to-date information that is consistent on all other platforms like your website, your GMB profile, and on the local business directories and forums, you might be used for promotion of your website. Here are the most important details for optimization of your Google my business profile.:
- Accurate description of your business
- choose the correct category of your business
- Most appropriate category for your business sector
- Upload high-resolution pictures of your storefront and indoors
- enter the opening/closing hours of the business
- Enter the Opening and closing hours of your business
- pay attention to entering the correct address
- Make sure the business address is correct
- enter the phone number and the various contacts
- Submit phone numbers with other contact methods like email.
- request/get reviews from your customers
- Encourage customers to leave reviews
- Update your profile with new offerings, or promotions.
- Enter operating distance
Google local search rankings – most important factors.
The three most important factors important for the ranking of a website on Google local search are as follows:
- Relevance,
- distance,
- prominence.
Google’s local search algorithm uses these three factors in combination, and other factors like business reviews, and its performance on web results to provide users with the best possible local search results based on their queries.
What exactly do Relevance, distance, and prominence mean for a local business:
Ranking Factor of Relevance
: Relevance refers to how closely related your business and product information is to the search query of the users. To make your business more relevant to your potential customers, you must perform thorough keyword research and update your business description on Google My business using the best keywords to describe your services. Also, you must select the category in Google My business that best describes your business.
Ranking factor of Distance
The factor of distance takes into consideration how far your business is from the location of the user searching on Google. If the user is looking for a gynecologist in San Francisco, the results will display only the gynecologists practicing and offering services in San Francisco and not other cities. To achieve prominence for the distance ranking factor, you must optimize your keywords for localization, and specify service distance in Google My Business.
Ranking factor of Prominence
With the Prominance factor, Google mostly takes into consideration how popular your business is offline and online. To measure the prominence of your business, it looks for mentions and articles on your business in local business forums or major business sources. As confirmed by Google, local search results, also take into consideration the web performance of your business, so you should also implement SEO optimization strategies for your business.
To concentrate on the actual core business, it is worthwhile to enlist the help of an expert. Through the project experience and in the general area of optimization, you get solutions from a single source and do not have to worry about the rise in search engines. Services that can help are quite extensive:
Just like Web search optimization, local SEO is a time-consuming and long-term marketing strategy. It’s worthwhile to let the experts handle it so that you can concentrate on core business activities. By signing up with the Social SEO Team you get affordable local SEO, regional, and international SEO solutions from a single source.
With professional solutions created by local seo experts at Social SEO Team, it will become quite easy for you to outrank your competitors in local and web search results. Even though our costs are affordable, we ensure the success of your business, create more awareness, increase footfall to your business, and improve sales,
Expert SEO Team for Your Local SEO
We use tried and tested local SEO strategies for local start-ups as well as SMEs.
Our local seo Strategies include but are not limited to:
- Local keyword search
- Create localization “product/service + location”
- Analyze your local competition
- Determine the search volume of your target keywords
- Optimize Google My Business, Bing Places, and Apple Maps
- Optimize your NAP – Name Address and Phone
- Create relevant NAP citations
- Add schema or structured data
- Local link building
- Collect Reviews
- Content marketing
Web Search optimization strategies to complement local SEO.
- SEO Audits
- Define your goals
- Create a buyer persona
- Install initial and basic SEO tools
- Do keyword research
- Analyze the competition
- on Page SEO
- off-page SEO
- Technical SEO
- Analysis and re-optimization
I hope that this local SEO guide has been helpful to your to create your local SEO strategy. If you liked it, don’t forget to checkout our local seo service page to learn more about the benefits of hiring our local SEO Experts for your website.
Last Updated on January 5, 2023 by Social SEO Team
