Effective Local SEO Marketing Helps Your Business Get Seen by the Local Consumers Who Matter to You
Simply put, local SEO is a search engine optimization process that helps businesses rank in local searches on Google so that consumers in the area will find a particular business. This is often a part of search inquiries that include the term “near me” or that include a location (for example, “coffee shops in Jacksonville), or search inquiries that are conducted while the internet user has their location settings turned on.
Effective local SEO marketing is a powerful way for businesses to get found online by potential customers. Done properly, it can help a business rank higher on local Google searches for the terms that matter to them.
There are three core elements of local search rankings:
Proximity:
The nearness of your business to the consumer who is searching for the products or services that you offer.
Relevance:
How relevant what your business offers is to what the consumer is searching for.
Prominence:
What consumers are saying about the products or services that you offer.
There are a few strategies that can help your business rank higher in local search inquiries:
- Geotargeting: This involves optimizing the keywords on your website to include local search terms such as the city, county, or region that your business is located in.
- Citation building: Make sure your company appears on citation sites and online business directories. When your business appears on these sites, it helps to build your authority and improve your search rankings.
- Claim your Google My Business listing: Claiming your business on Google My Business and building out your profile is free, so there is no reason not to take this important step. Having this profile set up is an easy but critical step towards ensuring your business appears on local Google searches and Google Maps inquiries.
- Manage reviews and ratings: Genuine, honest online reviews of your business are a way to signal to search engines that your business is trusted and your site is a useful source of information. The number of reviews that your business receives, the quality of those reviews, and the authority of the sites that the reviews appear on all contribute to your local search rankings on Google.
- Backlinks: Backlinks from trusted websites help signal to Google that your website is trustworthy and has authority. This can include links from newspapers, blogs, business associations, and citations.
A well-executed local search engine marketing strategy will help your business reach the consumers that matter most to you. The team at Enspire for Enterprise has the knowledge, experience, and skills to execute this strategy in a way that gets your business to rank higher on local search inquiries on Google and other search engines.
Learn more about how Enspire can help grow your small business