As a local business owner, you may feel there’s little point in investing time and finances to optimize your Google existence when you’re up against the likes of Walmart and Amazon for top-tier rankings. That might be valid when it comes to the main organic listings, but that is not the case for local searches.
The 10 Advantages of Local SEO
Better Online Visibility
Many of the activities associated with local SEO will not only assist you in enhancing your visibility in local search results but also assist you in building better online visibility overall.
Citation building is a staple of local SEO activity. This implicates building mentions of your company’s name, its physical address (ideally including zip code), and phone number via handbook listings, social media profiles, and online inspection platforms.
Because you’ll do this in as numerous distinct places as possible, it’s easier for your business to be found by the right people (those inquisitive about your distinct product or service in their local area) at the right time (when they’re busily searching for a company like yours).
More In-store Foot Traffic
Greater local visibility can assist in bringing more foot traffic to your location, whether you’re a cafe, dry cleaner, or hardware store. If you’ve invested heavily in specialist equipment, scheduled an innovative space, or have a brick-and-mortar location because your products are best undergone in person, growing the number of people stopping by can enable you to create a buzz about your space and make more sales.
Dab Into the Local Shopping Boom
In recent years, widespread differences in consumer buying habits have been seen. One of the most significant is that today’s consumers increasingly prioritize local businesses when it comes to making buying decisions.
56% of consumers say that they consciously provide their custom to local marts and actively seek out locally sourced products.
76% of consumers also say that they scheme to shop more locally over the next 12 months, meaning an opportunity is emerging for smaller, independent businesses to boost their sales. One of the core advantages of local SEO Services is it puts you in front of local consumers exactly when they need your products or services. As a result, this can empower you to leverage this shift in buyer behavior to develop your business entirely.
Targeted Web Traffic
As a small business, every minute you spend dealing with unconditional leads or people who aren’t competent to make a purchase or book a service is money lost.
Local SEO Services can assist weed out extraneous traffic and remove those time saps which prevent your business from running efficiently, helping ensure your business is merely visible to search users in your local area.
Additional Calls and Visits from Maps Users
Optimizing your Google Business Profile can direct to improved visibility on Google Maps. This, in turn, can direct to more calls and more in-person visits, since Google Maps was particularly planned to enable users to find regional services and plan their journeys.
Google Maps is occupied using information that Google gleans from Business Profiles, so any Google Business Profile optimization you run will instantly aid your Maps visibility, upgrading your number of calls and in-person visits.
Appoint a Position of Thought Leadership
Performing content commerce and link building is essential to establish prominence and relevance, two of the core pillars of local SEO rankings. This same activity can again help you to nurture a stature as a thought leader and expert in your field.
Local content marketing should inherently see you talking about your regional area or hometown and involving your local community. Not only does this enable you to grow your position as an expert voice, but it can furthermore bring your customers closer to your business, building stronger links, brand loyalty, and boosting engagement.
When you take the time to develop locally focused evergreen resources, you’re more likely to acquire links back to your site from other local businesses.
These links, whether from a local source like your city newspaper or an industry-specific site (like your regional room of business) can all add to your authority and credibility, enabling position yourself as a specialist in your field.
Enhanced Trust
It’s not a new thing that reviews are a cornerstone of local SEO success and a key local search ranking factor. The more reviews you get as a portion of your reputation management strategy, the more visibility you’ll earn in local searches.
Reviews are also an important ingredient for building consumer trust—a vital characteristic that precedes any business transaction.
Research confirms that more clients than ever before are reading online reviews more regularly, and half express they trust online reviews as much as subjective recommendations.
Tremendous visibility, plus top-rated, fresh reviews are magic both for local pack prominence and higher levels of consumer trust.
More Sales
Consumers use online reviews to assist with the decision-making process when preferring a local business.
Being able to present them with accurate recommendations from their peers for your business as an outcome of your reputation management activity is a powerful advantage and emphasizes just why taking Local SEO Packages is important.
Improved Conversion Rates
When asking, ‘What are the advantages of Local SEO Services?’ it’s easy to concentrate attention on what’s happening on Google and other platforms, but it can also play an explicit role in enhancing the structure and performance of your website.
Website optimization tasks carried out for local SEO, such as summing up new locally-focused optimization, and studying landing page text, all help with conversion rate optimization (CRO). From there, you should see a boost in the number of conversions your site generates, comprising boosts in contact form submissions, more phone calls, email subscriptions, or sales.
Your Firm Becomes More Competitive
A significant part of evolving and refining your local SEO strategy is benchmarking competitors and specifying what they’re doing better than you.
Identifying these opportunities to enhance (and being able to put the things they have learned into practice without the trial-and-error they may have gone through to reach a successful strategy) puts your business on a much more competitive footing. Studying their reviews, for example, could tell you what customers admire about their service so you can combine a similar approach within your own business.