Your introduction to local SEO for small businesses

Finding clients when you’re starting your business is no easy feat. You constantly have to come up with new and creative ways to pull customers in. 

This can be a little tricky to do if you don’t have any marketing experience. And even trickier when you’re busy doing everything else your business needs!

You might have come across the term “local SEO” in your quest to get new customers. It’s a tactic many businesses rely on to gain new customers especially if they provide localised services. 

But you might be wondering what is local SEO? And how can I use it for my service business?

Let’s take a look…

What is local SEO?

In short, it’s a digital tactic where you optimise your website and presence on search engines, like Google, to rank higher in search results for terms related to your service in the area you serve. And the localisation part is the key to this and a big reason why so many small businesses practice local SEO. It immediately reduces your field of competition.

If you’re interested in learning more about local SEO, you’ve come to the right place.

In this article, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about this excellent small-business marketing tactic. We’ll also discuss how it can help you grow your business. 

Local SEO overview

Local SEO is a process businesses can use to increase their brand awareness and reach more people actively looking for the services they offer. The aim is to optimize your site and rank for valuable keywords (search terms) related to your service in the area you operate.

In our day and age, when a customer needs a service, one of the first things they do is go online and search for a solution to their problem. For many, the starting place is search engines. They head to Google and type in their query.

To illustrate this, let’s use one of our clients Lucy Parker Photography as an example. For Lucy’swedding photography service some of the starting searches could be:

• Wedding photographer Swansea
• Wedding photography Swansea
• Best wedding photographer Swansea

The search engine will then give them a few options to consider. Let’s take a look at the top results:

As you can see, Google displays its results in a specific order and the user has three ways of accessing more information on what they are looking.

1. The top “find results on” section shows trade relevant business listings
2. The maps and business listing shows all relevant businesses listed on a map, making it easy to see locations, business reviews and contact details
3. The standard search results – linking to the most relevant web pages to the search term

Items one and two are the key difference between a local search result and a standard result; they are not used on non-local searches. This is why optimising your small business website for strong local search performance is essential. There’s a lot of real estate taken up by the local search features, meaning if you’re not on those listings you’re missing out on a lot of traffic.

Your aim with local SEO is to be present in as many of those three areas as possible. That means featuring in relevant business listing sites, optimising your Google Business profile, and creating relevant content on your website.

Let’s explore the advantages of local SEO in a bit more detail…

Advantages of local SEO for small businesses

At this point, as a busy entrepreneur, you may be wondering if local SEO ranking is worth the effort. It’s yet another parameter that you need to keep an eye on. 

In this section, we’ll cover the major advantages of local SEO. 

Helps you reach your target audience

At the beginning of a venture, most entrepreneurs think that any traffic is a blessing. Sadly, that’s not always the case.

They’ll notice that not all visitors to their site are going to purchase their services. That’s when finding your target audience becomes crucial. 

You need to locate clients in your area that are willing and looking to buy your products or services. Thankfully, local SEO can help you with this. 

With a high ranking, more people that are looking for your business will be able to find it. This means you’ll have higher conversion rates. 

It compliments your advertising

The main aim of any marketing plan is to increase brand awareness and reduce friction in buying your product or service. When it comes to promotion, the best way to do this is through a multichannel approach, with different media looking to achieve different aims while also working in support of each other.

For most small businesses, especially those that deliver a service in a certain geographical region, local SEO can be an excellent part of this multichannel mix. It’ll work on boosting your company profile and support finding more customers for the business as they search for the services you offer. 

It’s worth noting here, that many people will tell you SEO is cheap or free, and an excellent alternative to advertising, but that’s not the case.

Yes, there are many things you can do to optimise your website and local search presence, for real growth you need to invest in quality SEO content. The ideal scenario, as highlighted above, is to run both. The ins and outs of that are for another post though.

The awesome thing about SEO though is that it will compound over time.

Unlike advertising that stops as soon as you stop spending, if you create high-quality, keyword targeted, content it has the opportunity to rank for a long time. Plus each new page you publish has the opportunity to grow your website and target new search terms.

It’s worth reading our post on content hubs to get some tips on a neat way of doing this.

Decrease competition with local SEO

No matter what venture you start, there will usually be a certain level of competition. You’ll have to compete with other companies for customers. 

As a small business, it’s best to stay away from the giants in your industry. That way, clients won’t compare your company with theirs. 

This can be a major challenge with global SEO. Search engines will group all the ventures that provide similar services together. 

The easiest way to get around this issue is with local SEO. As we mentioned earlier, focusing your SEO on local searches drastically reduces your competition, as you’ll only compete with the companies that share your geographical location. 

Small business local SEO optimisation tips

Now that you understand the importance of local SEO, we can take a look at how to optimise your website and online presence for local searches. In this section, we’ll give you a few tips on how to boost your ranking that you can use today! 

Google My Business page

There are many search engines, but Google is by far the most popular. People all over the world rely on the site to ask queries about pretty much anything. 

For that reason, you must ensure your business is visible on Google. Your Google Business sitting is the information that displays in maps for local searches and on the right-hand side of search results when you search for your business name.

The quickest way to do that is by creating a Google My Business page. This is a tool that allows companies to register their information on the search engine.

They can record data like:

• Geographical location through Google Maps
• Company name
• Photos of products and storefronts

Using this tool will allow customers to find you in a flash.

Plus, it comes at no extra cost!

Keywords

Keywords are the starting point of all SEO. These are the phrases your customers type into search engines to find whatever it is they’re looking for.

The more search terms your website targets (effectively) the more chance you have of capturing your potential customer’s attention and getting the sale.

Keywords are also the way Google finds your content. It’ll scan your website and use it’s algorithm to determine what search terms (keywords) your web page should rank for.

To make this as easy as possible for search engines, each page you create needs a clear focus.

It’s no good trying to target every search term you want to rank for on one page. Nor is it any good trying to rank for search terms that have zero relevance to your business.  

You also want to avoid targeting the same search terms across multiple pages on your website. Google and other search engines won’t generally rank you in every position of the results just because you have ten pages targeting that search term.

There’s a lot more nuance to this than we’re explaining here, but as a starting point, a good rule of thumb is one search term or topic for one page of your site. If you want to target more terms, create more pages. Again, our content hubs article provides a great approach for doing this.

Original content

Following on directly from keywords, another excellent way to boost local SEO is by creating original content. There are many sites on the internet that reuse old articles or copy posts. Or poorly optimise their website content for the terms they are targeting.

These sites rank poorly when it comes to search engines.

So, to ensure your website is at the top of Google’s list, you have to come up with unique material. This is where you need to get creative and bring your expertise and unique point of view to the table.

The great benefit of investing in awesome content is that it supports our next tip…getting backlinks from other websites. Who’s going to link to a boring regurgitated article? Have something newsworthy and it’s a completely different story.

Need some inspiration? Just take a look at this campaign from Spaseekers promoting their dog-friendly spas!

Citations and backlinks

Once you create original content, you want to signal to Google that you know what you’re talking about and that you’ve created an awesome piece of content. You have to show the search engine that you’ve done plenty of research and can back up your claims.

The best way to do this is through links from other websites to yours. Google uses these links as a signal of trust and quality.

The first step in this process is spending the time to create awesome content that provides a unique perspective that stands out from the other results for the search terms you’re targeting.

Then it’s all about outreach and promoting your post with the aim of getting links from other websites.

Wrapping up

Local SEO is an incredibly useful tactic for small businesses. It can help you optimise your websites making it easier for clients to find you.

Additionally, local SEO can help make your marketing campaigns more effective and it can also reduce your competition. 

There are a few ways you can go about optimising local SEO. The best starting place is a Google My Business page followed by creating unique and engaging content that targets the keywords your customers are using in search engines.

Let us know how you get on with your local SEO efforts. Have you tried any of the things mentioned in this article and had success? Alternatively, if you’re stuck on any part of this, or just don’t have the time, give us a shout and we’ll be happy to help.