Why Your Business Should Implement Local SEO in 2021

Local SEO is a very important factor, which helps visitors when they are searching online. If you’re already engaging in an organic search engine optimization strategy, you may wonder why you need to care about local SEO. When customers in your area search keywords related to your business, local SEO ensures your site greets them at the top of search results. Ranking at the top of search results allows more people to find and ultimately visit and purchase from your local business, making it well worth the investment. On top of improving your overall online brand awareness, local search is a significant driver of leads, sales, and in-store traffic for local businesses. 

Local SEO Tips for Businesses in 2021 

Improve Google My Business Account

The first step to improving SEO for your local business is claiming your Google My Business account. Creating a Google My Business helps to find your business. We recommend you share regular posts about product updates and add your logo and images to give searchers an inside look at your business, also, encourage, and respond to client reviews.

Optimize for Google Maps

Google Maps is a tool that helps your visitors reach and discover you, with geolocation. Build and optimize the local citations, check out the properties, and be sure the citations include your business name, address, phone number, description of your business, and the link to your website.

Conduct Local Keyword Research

With keyword research, you can uncover keywords and phrases local customers search to find businesses, products, and services like yours. By conducting keyword research, you can gain a better understanding of how your target audience is searching for your business, and how you can strategically position your website pages to best align with their searches.

Optimize for Voice Search

More and more people use voice search to find a business near them. It can be considered hard work, but voice search optimization makes your content closer to human language. Right now is the perfect time to jump on the voice SEO ship and gain an edge over your competition.

Earn High-Quality Backlinks from Local Companies

Creating valuable local content is very important and also a great way to earn backlinks. Also, you can reach out to industry leaders and bloggers in your niche so they can share and link to your content.  We recommend you to get involved within your community by sponsoring local events as this will help you to get links from the event’s sponsorship page. For local businesses, this strategy has been proved to be very effective as many local businesses get benefits from it.

Along with sponsoring events and organizations, you can also organize your event and host it in order to generate links through promotional press releases, social media posts, partner newsletters, and so on.

We agree that the link-building process does take time and effort, but if it is done correctly, then the efforts and time invested will justify its worthiness. 

Make your Site Mobile Responsive

Make sure that your local SEO strategy includes responsive design. Now, this is more important than ever for making sure your local business ranks at the top of search results because having a mobile-friendly website is officially a ranking factor. The ultimate goal of responsive design is to avoid the unnecessary resizing, scrolling, zooming, or panning that occurs with sites that have not been optimized for different devices. It is often very difficult to navigate these sites, and it may even cost you potential customers who become frustrated with trying to figure out how to do something.

Stay Active on Social Media

While social media may not directly impact your rankings, social media marketing can support your local SEO strategy in several ways. Social media is a valuable asset that helps brands promote their products and stay in touch with online customers. Nowadays everyone on social media is being located, by the things that they like and the things that they do. So, neglecting to incorporate social media into your marketing plan can cost you – not just in terms of new potential customers who don’t know you (and who your competitor is happy to collect) but also in terms of retaining your existing customers. By building a relationship with your clients, your chances of retaining them will increase considerably.

Make Use of Listings and Online Directories

The Internet is full of listing sites and business directories from small firms to great competitive companies. Since these websites require your address and other local business information, it makes sense that these sites would be beneficial in amplifying your presence online. Start your local SEO strategy off on the right foot by claiming and completing profiles on these popular listing sites. Online directories make it easier and more convenient for consumers to identify product manufacturers, service providers, and other businesses.

Capitalize on Customer Reviews

Local consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. 

With this, it’s easy to see how online reviews are a key factor for a successful local SEO strategy. Leveraging this SEO tactic will increase your visibility on search engines and map listings. Consumers use these to judge a business, so it is crucial to generate authentic customer positive reviews. Also, it will help optimize your Google My Business listing. Reviews are social proof that encourages people to buy. We recommend you share the link with the customers to find it easier and review your business. 

Localized Website Content

The idea in a localization content strategy is to identify what content segments are unique to each geographical area and highlight those on a state level, city level, and even micro-local level by building dedicated pages for these audiences. The key is to provide true value to these end-users by surfacing very relevant information that is specific to them based on their city or state. By doing so you not only increase your propensity to show up in organic search queries in those places, but you also potentially improve your conversion rate by creating a more custom experience for those users which speaks specifically to their needs. The higher value the information presented on these geo-centric pages, the more viable this strategy is.

Conclusion

Local search engine optimization plays an important part in your marketing activities as it puts your business in front of customers when they are searching for it. The higher you rank in results pages, the more clicks and traffic your site will generate. These factors play an important role when customers are in your region for the first time and searching online. Stay ahead of your competitors ranking your business higher, constantly improving, and updating your local SEO strategy.

It is known that more than 50% of local searches result in a purchase. The story doesn’t end there. At least 78% of all local mobile searches result in an offline purchase. Additionally, 61% of local searchers are more likely to contact a local business if they have their contact information. 

If you don’t know where to start with local SEO, just contact our expert team, and we can help you do great things together!