What Is Local SEO?

When we say at LSEO that we can help your website rank higher through the power of SEO, we’re referring to so many things that work together to accomplish this goal. Technical SEO, content marketing, backlink acquisition–it’s all vital stuff.

How about local SEO? If we boil that down to its most basic definition, local SEO is the website optimization we do to help you rank higher among online searchers in your business’s geographic area.

But probably too few people will be doing that unless you can show the internet why it’s a good idea to visit you. Our local SEO services can help here. Let’s explain how it all works.

Local SEO is simply everything that’s good and right about SEO but pivoted specifically toward your local desired audience. When people search for businesses today, they do so online. They might type in, or voice-command, queries such as “italian restaurants springfield illinois” or “vinyl records scranton pa.”

By going after terms such as those on your website, we can target the very people you want to get in your doors but who currently don’t even know you exist!

In the end, that’s what local SEO is all about: getting people who don’t know your business to click on your name and discover all the amazing products and services you offer.

That’s what LSEO can help your business to do with our local online marketing.

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What Does Local SEO Consist of?

So, you know what local SEO is and how it’s used. Now, what components make it up?

There are a ton of parts to this. Let’s name some of the essentials.

Google My Business

If you’re a local business, one of the most important steps we’ll take for you first is to claim and optimize your Google My Business listing. This is that box of information that shows up on the right side of Google when you search for a local business.

There, online users will find your business’s name, address, phone number, photos, website URL, business hours (including any special hours you maintain), customer reviews and rankings, directions to the location, and any questions and answers that people have written.

Every local business should fully optimize its Google My Business profile, as this is a rich vault of information about you that potential customers will need if they want to get to you. That’s why it is so important to ensure the data here is accurate.

Website Optimization for Local Search

Your Google My Business profile is vital to have, but you need more than that if you want to be primed for local search; not every potential customer out there knows your business’s name or will see your Google My Business box. For everyone else, we need to optimize your website itself for local SEO.

This consists of a number of factors. First, your website hierarchy should reflect the most important information in prominent positions. In this case, your business’s contact information should be found in the header and footer of every page.

You should also have a clean, easily readable contact page with information that matches your Google My Business data. We advise maintaining separate contact pages for each physical location your business has. This will help people keep things clear in their heads, but it will also aid Google’s search crawlers as they index your site.

We then come to keyword research, a crucial leg of any good local SEO strategy. We need to show people and the search engines where you are located. To do that, we target local keywords for your meta titles and meta descriptions.

With our local online marketing services, we’ll do your keyword research for you and find the best descriptive terms for your pages. Although it’s important to have these terms in your tags for Google’s purposes, your focus should primarily be on what potential customers would find most useful for learning about your business.

If those terms for you are “best bankruptcy lawyer in sacramento” or “snowboarding gear in aspen,” then adding that information to your meta tags will go a long way toward helping Google rank your site and inform customers of what you offer as a business.

Other local SEO musts include fast load times and mobile-friendliness. These factors are vital for any website looking to rank amidst their competition in the search engines.

Why Your Website Needs Local SEO

Everyone already knows about the huge corporations out there. They get more than enough exposure the way things are now. In that light, local businesses need to do all they can to stay competitive and retain and grow their customer base.

Local SEO helps you to do this. It optimizes your website from a technical standpoint to get picked up in local searches while simultaneously showing the online users who find you what makes you stand out from your competition.

Think about it like this: few people look to billboards or newspaper ads to find out about local businesses anymore. People are online, asking Google for options for this or that type of business. Local SEO primes your website for Google consideration. When Google ranks you, then the very customers you want to reach are going to find you.

Why Choose Our Local SEO Services?

Once you understand what local SEO is used for, you can try to implement it yourself, but to save time and be certain you’re doing it all correctly, why not hire professionals who already know exactly what to do? LSEO’s local SEO services come with all kinds of benefits.

Google My Business Optimization

As we mentioned above, optimizing your Google My Business listing is one of the most vital steps in perfecting your local SEO. Our SEO experts will go through your listing and ensure everything is up to date and accurate. Any potential customers who find your Google My Business profile will know exactly how to do business with you.

Big Citation Building

Citation building means that we create mentions of your business and company information in local directories, social media sites, and other websites. The more local citations you have across the internet, the greater authority you will have in Google’s eyes. The citations our experts can build for you include Yelp, Yellowpages, and Facebook.

Local Content Creation

Aside from your meta tags, content is another optimum place to use local keywords that we research for you. We’ll create local pages for your website that are designed to rank in Google for the local terms people use when they search.

This is the strategy we always suggest, especially when a business has multiple locations. No matter which location people search for in their query, they will find your business if there is a local content page to go along with it.

Growth

At the core of all this local SEO is growth for your business. Local online marketing makes your business more visible across the internet. That visibility translates into financial growth for you if your services match what your customers want.

So often, we see businesses that have what people are looking for, but the public just isn’t finding them. Our local SEO services can make that happen.