Ranking high on Google search takes time, especially if you’re targeting a specific location. It’s why local SEO services are legit game-changers. Aside from building content strategies that appeal to your target market, these localized services ensure you’re on top of your market’s search query results based on proximity factors.
The significance of local SEO services cannot be overstated, given the prevalence of online searches for company information. In 2022, Google processed an average of 40,000 search queries every second worldwide, amounting to 3.5 billion searches on a daily basis. This demonstrates a consistent trend in consumer behavior, indicating a preference for online searches over other sources when seeking product or service information.
As a business, this means upping your game to ensure you’re among the top options when they look for your product. If you need help getting started, you can contact our experts to quickly walk you through the process and provide options tailored to your marketing plans.
How Does Local SEO Work?
Local SEO works with the idea of creating campaigns and strategies on a smaller scale. This means targeting specific geographic locations so potential customers searching from those areas find your website or page on their online queries.
Anyone can use local SEO services, but it’s primarily beneficial for businesses that either have a physical location or those servicing specific states or cities.
What Are the Best Local SEO Services for Boosting Business Visibility?
Each local SEO service on our list can be a standalone strategy, but reaping the full benefits requires a combination of multiple types.
1. SEO Audit
Think of this as your website’s diagnostic exam. An SEO audit examines your site’s overall state, including design, structure, keywords, on-page SEO, and user experience. This service is done even before implementing any strategies.
Auditing allows you or your team of experts to identify fundamental issues that affect your site’s organic search performance. With this data, you can make more accurate adjustments to ensure a Google-friendly platform before publishing any content.
2. Site Localization
This is a strategy where you tell search engines to index your site pages based on the county, city, state, or region where you’re offering the service. You do this by incorporating directional details on your site content, including, but not limited to, your contact page and footer area.
If you’re operating on multiple locations, the rule of thumb is to localize separate pages for each area instead of doing it on your landing page. Site localization also touches on cultural elements fit for a region. This means using the same language or tone suitable for your target audience.
3. Localized Content Creation
This one deals with the nitty-gritty of every content you publish on your site. This strategy falls under items like blog posts, videos, guides, and ebooks. The idea is to create content that benefits local consumers to enhance your on-page optimization.
For instance, if you’re running a food delivery service within a city, creating a blog category highlighting information such as the best restaurants in your area or any list and how-to guides can help. This also attracts potential backlinks from other local services that find your post relevant, thus increasing your site’s visibility.
4. Link Building
Link building or backlinks goes hand in hand with your content creation strategy. This is where you identify authority sites you want to link to your business. Entities such as media outlets, community groups, directory sites, and local businesses are excellent sources for quality backlinks.
Attracting quality backlinks is one of the most foolproof strategies to rank higher in search engines, but it’s also trickier than most items on our list. Any site can link back to your business, but not all enhance your relevance in localized searches.
This is where SEO and digital marketing agencies come in handy. They develop alternative initiatives such as event sponsorship and charity participation to target entities who can link back to your site specifically. This way, you won’t have to do the legwork to determine whom you should tap.
5. Google Business Profile Setup and Post Management
Setting up your Google business profile is necessary if you’re serious about attracting customers. As of January 2023, Google takes 84.69% of global market searches, which tells you that it’s likely where your customers will be looking when searching for a product.
An optimized business profile is more than just a name and address. It also includes the following:
- High-resolution photos of your business location or products
- Videos introducing what your business is all about
- Engaging company description
- Local phone number
- Social media accounts
- Website URL
- Hours of operation
- List of products and services
Once these are set up, Google posting and management follow. This is a great way to share company announcements, events, and special offers that local customers may be interested in.
6. Building and Managing Citations
Any online mentions of your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) data count as citations and are just as important as building quality backlinks. Citations serve as a directory or review of the listing for your business, so more citations from authority websites mean better ranking in the long run.
Online citations come from hundreds of sources, but top sources include social media profiles, online review sites, business directories, and event listings. Managing these citations involves ensuring your business profile remains accurate and current.
7. Reputation Management
This has something to do with your business’s perceived public reputation based on data you’ll get from online reviews. Consumers these days read reviews to help them in their purchasing decision, and you don’t want to be on the negative side of people’s opinions.
Apart from combing through relevant sites to see what people are saying about your business, reputation management also covers these areas:
- Responding to good and negative reviews
- Identifying recurring issues flagged so you can address it
- Identifying quality review platforms
- Requesting reviews from authority sites or blog owners
Reputation management helps you get a general feel of your customers’ satisfaction rating, which you can use to improve products or services where needed.
8. Digital Marketing Campaigns Tracking
This strategy focuses on evaluating the performance of your marketing campaigns, such as paid advertising, leads generation, social media engagements, and guest posting. Campaign tracking is all about translating raw data into numbers, which marketing agencies can then use as benchmarks to assess the efficiency of a campaign based on initial projections.
Efficient digital marketing leads to more organic traffic, which impacts your search rankings, so constantly monitoring its performance gives you a better chance at tweaking existing campaigns to stay relevant to the market.
This strategy is also perfect for experimenting with different campaign combinations, such as video reels, influencer marketing, and social media.
9. Keyword Research
Keyword research is all about identifying specific keywords used by your target audience within an area and incorporating these words across different parts of your site. You can place them in your site or product description, landing page, or blog post content.
However, this is more than just a one-off strategy, given the fluctuating market trends affecting customer behavior. It means you’ll have to regularly conduct keyword research using automated tools to ensure your keyword stack remains relevant to your market’s search.
10. Search Rank Monitoring
You can think of this as your local SEO strategy’s housekeeping. This is where you monitor your site’s local search rank performance to assess the efficiency of your current marketing strategy. It’s your most reliable source of knowing whether the other strategies deliver results.
Rank monitoring includes examining keyword and URL performances, which are indicative factors for any potential Google penalties resulting from algorithm changes. Catching this early on allows you to adjust strategies before it does more damage to your site’s local ranking.
11. Competitor Analysis
The end goal of this strategy is to outrank your competition and ensure you stay on top of the rest. The competitive analysis delves into the details of your direct competition’s search ranking, their best posts, their number of social engagements, and more.
If you’re competing against an established brand, this is your chance to examine its best practices and incorporate them into your own strategy. This process also helps you keep tabs on emerging competition gaining online traction.
What are the Benefits of Local SEO Services?
It’s easy for small businesses and startups to hesitate to invest in local SEO services. After all, no services offer a hundred percent guarantee for success. Still, its benefits far outweigh any reasons to do away with it. Here’s a quick rundown of what you’ll get when using these strategies:
1. Increased Visibility
As you work on building backlinks and optimizing your site, your online visibility will eventually improve. This puts your business at the forefront of your market’s radar, especially for those who have yet to commit to brands.
2. More Site Traffic
Localizing all your strategies increases your search rank based on client location, which improves your clickthrough rates. And while site visits don’t guarantee immediate sales, more visitors are always better in the long run.
3. Lesser Advertising Cost
Advertising is crucial, but doing so across multiple channels is costly. You’re not only talking about print advertising like banners and pamphlets. Your service may also need some local TV ad exposure. The goal of all this publicity is to spread awareness.
Local SEO services help you do this, minus the hefty cost. Yes, it can take time, but it can pay dividends through increased publicity with lesser advertising expenses when done well consistently.
4. Boost Lead Conversions
It’s no mystery how customers limit their attention to the first page results of their query. Seldomly you can find people searching through Google’s second-page results. So you shouldn’t be surprised to see an influx of new leads as your site ranks higher.
Your rank is viewed as a badge of authority, and consumers are likely to purchase from companies they see on the first pages of their search.
5. Increase Local Reviews
The 2023 online review data released by Exploding Topics finds 93% of consumers admitting to online reviews as having a significant impact on their purchasing decision. This tells you that more positive online reviews from locals will likely help increase your sales.
Local SEO services help you achieve this by bringing your business to the forefront of the best local options and encouraging customers to leave reviews on your service.
Granted that you’ve consistently provided quality service to your market and are prompt in acknowledging positive and negative comments, Google will interpret this as a sign of positive customer experience, which helps boost your online reputation.
6. Build Strong Local Community
Local SEO services help you become a reliable company within your area. As you start seeing the benefits of your initial strategies, you also help build a strong community of local shoppers that prefer getting their products from someone nearby.
This establishes your authority as a solid provider in that area, which helps you gain trust in case you want to start scaling.
7. Acquire Quality Backlinks
Localizing your SEO strategies encourages you to contact relevant entities for collaborations and sponsorships. You can even cross-promote products from other businesses and vice versa. This helps you gain more exposure from their clientele by linking to your site.
Boost Your Business’s Online Visibility With Our Hands-On Experts
Local SEO services are essential strategies for building a brand reputation from scratch. They’re specific, well-targeted, and measurable across the board. If you’re operating a business within certain locations, investing in the strategies we’ve listed puts you steps ahead of your competition in terms of online visibility.
While you can start any of these strategies by yourself, working with a team of experts like Romain Berg boosts the efficiency of the process by ensuring you have everything covered step-by-step. Give us a call and allow us to tailor-fit your SEO strategies for surefire local visibility.
