Looking to expand your brand’s local reach? Get the full breakdown on local SEO for small business in this guide from Go Florida SEO

Appealing to the local audience is a great business strategy. This ensures you get immediate business with people who can come back for more if they like it. Putting up flyers to advertise your business is enough to let them know about your business, but people can still miss it or ignore the ad if it doesn’t interest them.

What interests people nowadays is the Internet. This makes it essential to understand the importance of local SEO for small business ventures. Local SEO is a powerful tool to have since 4 of 5 people prefer ads about businesses close to them.

This is because people love the convenience and will find a nearby business more appealing to engage with. How much can local SEO impact your business, though? Read on to learn how important it is.

What Is Local SEO?

Local SEO is a branch of search engine optimization that focuses on smaller areas. Unlike regular SEO, optimizing for local SEO makes it easier for users within an area to discover your business. People searching about relevant businesses outside your area will produce the opposite result and make it harder for them to look for your brand.

While this may look bad at first, it can be more helpful for your business. This is because local SEO is a situational option you can consider if your business model suits it. It’s perfect for businesses that rely on foot traffic like restaurants or lodging.

This means that you must have a physical store to go to when you want to take advantage of local SEO. Not having one means that you may miss out on business opportunities with people who find your brand interesting.

Why Is Local SEO for Small Business Important?

The importance of local SEO goes beyond an increase in foot traffic to your store. This is important because more people have a similar trend in searches. People nowadays add a “near me” or “close to me” when they search for a business.

This means that Google and other search engines will focus on websites optimized for local searches. Local SEO for small business models allows them to grow their companies. It will increase your chances of someone going to your store on the same day they search.

Benefits of Local SEO

Local SEO helps not only in growing your company. There are more reasons to opt for local SEO beyond that. Here are some benefits you can get by optimizing your website for local searches.

1. Increased Foot and Web Traffic

The main benefit of local SEO is that you will experience more traffic in your physical store. This will help you make a profit if local SEO helps you at the right time. Tourist seasons and events are ideal situations to make the local SEO worth your investment.

You may notice that more people will come to your store even after the ideal situations pass. This is because people will find out about your brand online. This is thanks to the web traffic your business will generate with local SEO.

People visiting your store will be because of the local searches they did. The more people look into your website, the higher it will rank after a while. This makes it a great long-term plan for generating business for your brand.

2. Keeps Your Brand Competitive

Your competition is among the biggest obstacles you will face in the local scene. They will always look for ways to be a better version of your store. This will be to help them be the go-to store for the customers in your area.

This will create a healthy economy for the area, but you will hate to lose customers to your competitors. This makes it important that people will find out about your business first. This is especially important for new customers as they often stick to the first brand they like.

With local SEO, you won’t have to worry about your customers finding out about your competitors. Your brand will appear on top if you have a killer local SEO score. The only worry you will have is the location of your store.

Search engines often rank businesses that are closer to the origin of the search higher. There’s next to nothing you can do about it except choose a great location for your store.

3. Customer Loyalty

Local SEO can also increase the customer’s loyalty to your brand. This will be because of the convenience they will experience with your store. Finding your physical store means that it’s the closest one around.

If you provide a good enough service, they will consider your store to be the best choice. This will convince them to do business with you again if they need the same service. Remember that it all starts from having your business on top of the search results.

This is a good reason to make sure you optimize your website in any way you can. Doing this can help you in building a long-term relationship with your clients.

4. Builds Trust Among Local Audiences

Another reason to increase your local SEO score is to get your audience to trust you. Having a great SEO score for the local area often means you’re active on the Internet. Your brand can be active on the Internet by having a strong social media presence or by posting relevant content on the regular.

Doing this ensures that your audience sees you as an authoritative figure in your field. People will follow a brand that looks like they know what they’re talking about. All you need to do is post content and engage with your customers.

Soon enough, you will look like an expert in your field compared to others who don’t do this. This will also help you get more customers from their recommendations. They often refer to the best that they know, and this will make it easier to keep your brand in their minds.

5. Reduces Overall Advertising Costs

The best reason to optimize for local SEO is that it costs less than other advertising options. Having a high score is a free advertisement if you think about it. This is because people will look into your business first before any other ones on the list.

This is a good advantage to have since people often look at the top 3 results when searching for something. The other results don’t get as much attention unless it’s different from the top 3. This means maintaining an optimized website can help you increase customers.

These are better compared to paying for ads on social media platforms. There are ways to cut costs such as hiring a PPC consultant, but it can’t beat the value of free advertising.

6. Mobile Growth Makes Your Brand Scalable

Local SEO is also a great way to future proof your brand. This stems from the growth of mobile phone users. This is important because people will have more convenient ways to search for something on the Internet.

This ties into the scalability of your business. SEO takes a long time to affect your website. It takes even longer for the factors to have a significant impact on your score.

Optimizing your website for local SEO as soon as you can help you rank higher. You will be ahead of the websites that only go when the trend is at its peak. It also helps you by setting your website for future searches.

7. Can Help Your Business Grow

Having a successful business means more than serving the most customers than others. It means having a great relationship with your competitors, too. This goes the same with other businesses in your area.

Ranking high on the search list means that your website becomes a great investment. This will cause more brands to have a partnership with you. It also raises your brand’s name as a commodity among global brands.

Speaking of which, great local SEO can be a stepping stone to becoming one of them. Partnerships and deals will help your brand become known outside your reach. This will be a great way to let the world know about your business.

Local SEO Strategies

Now that you know what you can get from local SEO, here’s how you can get them. These are the best and most reliable local SEO strategies today.

1. White Hat Link Building

This is the most reliable way to increase your local SEO score. This is because it involves building relationships with websites to get reliable backlinks. Getting links from any website is easy, but them linking to yours is hard.

White hat link building means that you create a website worth linking to. This means you have to pay attention to different aspects of your website. Looking into the likes of reputable websites like Forbes can help you get a read on what they want.

This may sound like a lot of work for a simple local SEO strategy. The beauty of white hat link building, though, is in its reliability. Links built with white hat tactics often survive the changes in SEO trends.

2. Geo-Fence Ad Targeting

This is a great way to ensure people entering your area will know about your brand. This is because a good geofencing campaign means people get your push notifications.

Geofencing works by having you set a geofence around a certain area. This can be anywhere as long as it doesn’t interfere with other geofence ads from other brands. When someone enters the area, they will receive your push notification.

It’s a great way to alert potential customers nearby. All you need is for them to have an internet connection when they enter the geofenced area.

You also must make sure to not overdo it. Nothing will annoy people more than many unwanted notifications. This can make you lose them as potential customers.

3. Social Media Marketing

Social media is the main reason for most people to go online. They check the latest news and updates from their peers on different platforms. This many people on these websites mean that it’s easy to get people to notice your brand there.

Being active on social media is a sign that the business itself is active. Search engine bots will like this and will increase your score. This alone is already a great way to increase your local SEO score.

This also makes more people notice your brand, leading to more traffic to your profile. This will also help increase your local SEO score. Combine these with the profits you’ll make, and your brand will find success.

Targeting social media audiences is also easy. Social media platforms often ask about the interests of their users. This allows you to perform behavioral targeting on Facebook and other platforms.

4. Website Optimization

Optimizing your website is the simplest way to rank higher. This is because search engines want to provide high-quality websites to their users. The better your website is, the higher they will rank it based on that alone.

There are many factors to website optimization. The page loading speed of your website is always the first one they check. This is because people often hop out of a website if it takes over 5 seconds to load a page.

Removing unnecessary plugins and clearing your cache will help with this. Optimizing your website for mobile users is also a great idea. More people are using mobile devices like smartphones to access the Internet today.

Creating content is also among the best ways to optimize your website. This provides you with a medium to place quality keywords on your website. It also provides your customers with informative articles and videos, gaining their trust.

Increase Your Local SEO Score Today

Nothing rivals the importance of local SEO for small business models. Understand local SEO and improve your business today!

Looking for a great digital marketing agency to help you with your business? Contact us here and we’ll get in touch with you as soon as we can! We will help you find the right marketing strategy for your business.