Even savvy business owners don’t necessarily know all the nuances involved with search engine optimization. While that’s the case, SEO is important for businesses of all sizes in all industries regardless of whether they operate online exclusively or they have a physical location in addition to an e-commerce website.
SEO involves all the things you do to improve where your website lands in search engine results pages and drive high-quality, organic traffic to your website. By its very definition, you can probably infer how important search engine optimization is for businesses that have a digital presence.
While search engine optimization is undeniably important, local SEO is even more so for companies that have a brick-and-mortar location and businesses that provide services in a defined area. The purpose of local SEO is to promote your visibility in SERPs that are initiated by location-based queries. In other words, the goal of local SEO is to ensure your business is found in SERPs generated for people who are searching for your business, goods or services at or close to your physical location.
In general, local searches include geo-qualifiers. These qualifiers may include a city, state, zip code or landmark. Local searches may also include the words “near me.” In this case, a search engine like Google will identify the location of the searcher and provide search results based on the individual’s geographic location. Many “near me” searches include key buying signals, like “to buy.”
It’s common knowledge that smartphones are what most consumers under 50 years-old rely on for digital purposes, including searches. The majority of smartphone users conduct local searches at various times, although the frequency of those searches can vary greatly from one mobile user to the next.
While some estimates are as high as 50 percent, Google’s official stance is that local searches account for 30 percent of all searches. When you consider that Google processes more than 40,000 searches every second, a lot of local searches are being initiated right now.
The top reason you should focus on local SEO isn’t the volume of local searches that are being conducted every second of every day. Rather, the number one reason you should focus on local SEO is that local searches can drive traffic to your physical location. Research shows that the majority of local searches result in a consumer visiting a brick-and-mortar store, with a considerable number of those in-store visits yielding a purchase.
For your local SEO campaigns to be successful and produce increased traffic in your store, it’s vital that you do everything possible to get your site to rank in the first few spots in SERPs. A recent survey revealed that 60 percent of mobile users are very likely to click on the first two or three results in SERPs while 90 percent of them are likely to click on the first result.
If you’re not making the most of local SEO, you should let our SEO agency handle it for you. When you sign up for one of our digital marketing plans, you can rest assured that our experts will maximize local SEO to your advantage. Contact My Creative Mark so we can get started today!