Search engine optimisation is an important part of a business’s online presence, but if you operate a website that’s tied to a store with a physical location, targeting a general online audience isn’t necessarily the right approach. In these cases it’s typically more beneficial to focus on local SEO, which targets potential customers within one or more specific geographic regions.
The vast majority of people now use online media to find local sources of products and services, and most of them do it via search engines. This means that it’s hugely important for virtually all kinds of businesses to not only have an online presence, but to optimise their business presence so that it ranks well in online search results. This is what SEO is all about. Most of the time, it’s important for businesses to get specific about the people and places they target for search engine rankings. This is called local SEO.
Generally, local SEO is about targeting the location where a physical store is located, or the area served by a service provider. Sometimes it might also include targeting specific regions or even countries to which a business delivers products. For the most part, however, local SEO refers to the former situation where a small or medium sized business is aiming to use online tools to capture traffic from geographically local consumers.
For a business that operates solely within a defined geographic area, trying to improve your global search results is more or less wasted effort. If you own a chain of shops in London and don’t sell products online, your advertising campaigns are probably targeted to London, and perhaps some outlying areas. On the other hand, there’s no point in reaching customers located in New Zealand or Australia.
The same principle is true when it comes to online advertising, but it’s even more important simply because it’s so easy to inadvertently target too wide an audience. A local focus is particularly vital when an online marketing campaign includes paid advertising, as ignoring this aspect of advertising can lead to wasting money on advertising that isn’t geographically relevant.
When you run a local business, the only kind of advertising you need—and the only kind you want to spend money on—is advertising that targets the local population. Depending on the size and the nature of the business this might be a single town or city, a county, or even the whole country. In general, the rule is that if your customers are confined to a particular location, then your advertising should be too. And again, this is just as important when it comes to online advertising as it is when targeting TV, radio, or print advertising.
Even if this weren’t a consideration, local listings would still be important because of the way Google deals with local search engine queries. When a user searches for something and includes a specific geographic location in their search terms, Google will always rank location-specific results higher than results that don’t match the location terms. And increasingly, even searches that don’t mention specific places are taking into account the searcher’s location. For example, for Gmail users who search Google while signed into their account, any searches they make may take into account their location. The same goes for people who search using their mobile device. In both cases, search results may be location-specific even when the search queries aren’t.
Local and global search listings are similar in many respects, in that ranking for a specific search term involves a wide range of ranking factors including but not limited to website content, backlinks, and web page design. There are, in fact, hundreds of ranking factors that influence how well a website performs in search results, and for the most part they apply to both global and local search engine listings.
There’s one very obvious difference between local and global listings, however, and that’s simply that local listings are confined to a discrete geographical area, while global listings can in theory cover the entire world. But there are other differences that are more subtle, and are yet more important in terms of how they affect a business that operates locally. There are several different factors that can make a contribution to the success of a local SEO strategy.
Website: Even though most people use a search engine to find local products and services, in most cases their next port of call is the website of the business that looks the most promising. This means that a relevant and user-friendly website is extremely important—especially because many people will visit a website up to half a dozen times before they make a purchase of products or services. Because of this, the website is easily one of the most important elements of a local SEO strategy.
While the website is an important element, it’s definitely not the be-all and end-all when it comes to local SEO. In fact, when it comes to local listings, a business’s website isn’t always the most important source of online information about that business. For local businesses it’s just as important, if not more so, to have an up-to-date Google+ local listing as it is to have a comprehensive website.
Google My Business: This business management tool allows business owners to create a Google+ page for their business. A Google+ Local page allows a business owner to manage their online presence by giving them control over the information they submit to Google Search, Google Maps, and Google+. Note that to make local SEO truly effective, having a Google+ local listing is absolutely essential. This is because when a business is listed and has a Google+ presence it benefits from improved local search results, along with other advantages such as a higher level of visibility in both search engine and map search results.
Citations: Another crucial facet of the local SEO approach is that for local SEO, citations are more important than backlinks. For global SEO, getting authority websites to link to your own site is an excellent way of improving search engine results; however, for local SEO this isn’t the best strategy to focus on. Instead, for local SEO it’s citations that improve the rankings. A citation is a single mention of your business in its capacity as a business: for example, a business listing on Google+, or a review from a customer. Unlike backlinks, for citations to count, they don’t need to be associated with a hyperlink. What’s important is that the information provided by the citation matches what’s provided on your own website and Google+ pages: your business’s name, address, and phone number must be included, all on the same page, for a citation to have any value for your business.
This is an important thing to remember when it comes to setting up a website, Google+ page, and other social media pages. All of your citations should follow precisely the same format for best results, which means, for example, taking care that you don’t abbreviate street names in some places and not in others, and ensuring that your phone number is formatted the same way in all locations where you include it.
Reviews: Customer reviews in general are important in terms of their value as citations; however, when your business gets good reviews—and lots of them—there is no more valuable ranking factor for local SEO. If you can encourage your satisfied customers to leave reviews on your business’s Google+ page, your local SEO will almost certainly improve noticeably.
This is due to the simple fact that Google ranks businesses more highly when they have plenty of good customer reviews tied to their listings. Just as important, people who search for a product or service and have several businesses in their search results will naturally choose a five star business over one with an average rating of three stars.
There are many ways that businesses can improve their local search engine rankings: some are relatively quick and simple ways to get a small but noticeable improvement, while others involve an outlay of time or money to get the ball rolling.
There are lots of simple things a website owner can do to improve local SEO, and also plenty of things to avoid if improving local SEO is your goal.
In particular, make sure, first and foremost, that your business has a Google+ Local business listings presence. This, along with your business website, is your most important ranking factor for local SEO, so it’s essential to do it correctly.
Other forms of social media can also be useful, but note that it’s important to keep it focused on local content, and ensure that your citations are all formatted properly.
AdWords can be hugely useful in targeting local customers, but not in the way you might think. Using AdWords for local advertising doesn’t rely on the text you use for the ads themselves; instead, it’s all about the settings you use for determining when ads are displayed, and to whom. Google AdWords actually allows you to use geotargeting to focus your advertising on specific countries, cities, and even city neighbourhoods. It works by targeting customers based on their location, if known, and showing ads only to people who live in the target areas. With the ability to target advertising to specific locations you get more value for the money you spend on PPC, because you’re far less likely to waste impressions or clicks on people who don’t live near your business.
There are several different kinds of geotargeting:
Choosing an appropriate geotargeting strategy is a great way to keep your PPC costs down, and at the same time ensure that you’re targeting the audience that you really want to reach.
Note that you can also choose to target ads to particular times and days of the week, a useful strategy that can have great results when it’s used carefully. For example, if you operate a B2B organisation you may find it more beneficial to run ads during the day, when other businesses are more likely to be making searches that are relevant to your services.
As will most things pertaining to the internet, what you’ve got today will be old news tomorrow. Local SEO is not something you can set up and then forget about: to keep your search engine rankings looking good, it’s important to focus on getting new satisfied customers, new reviews, and new citations on a regular basis.
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