According to the 2023 Gartner Technology Marketing Benchmarks Survey, 11% of respondents pointed at search engine optimization (SEO) as generating the most marketing qualified leads, making it the third most effective digital marketing tactic according to respondents. [1]
As a subset of search engine optimization strategies, local SEO can be a powerful asset in the digital marketing arsenal of small businesses. Local SEO tactics can help SMBs attract more qualified leads that result in more conversions and a more robust return on marketing investment.
To understand how to leverage local SEO, it’s important to know what sets local SEO apart from traditional SEO strategies, the benefits it brings to SMBs, and how to craft a strategy that works for your organization.
What is local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (SEO) is an SEO strategy that focuses on growing organic local search visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). Local SEO leverages SEO methods that improve a website’s ability to increase traffic and capture business. Local SEO helps small businesses improve their ability to competitively engage with local consumers actively searching for your products or services.
Local SEO is a powerful method for building stronger connections with local consumers already seeking out products and services in your industry. Local search advertising can become a way for SMBs to maximize visibility in a segment of their target audience that will maximize their marketing spend. It also prevents SMBs from investing resources to reach potential leads outside of their target market who may never actually patronize their business.
Top 6 benefits of local SEO
In addition to allowing small businesses to improve audience targeting by focusing their marketing spend on an invested and engaged audience segment, there are a number of benefits that come along with a well-structured local SEO strategy.
Competitive advantage
Local SEO isn’t a universal practice, especially for SMBs who don’t have a skilled marketing team or agency in place. Small businesses who can invest in local SEO have a clear competitive advantage over their local competitors as well as any competitors operating on a larger scale who might not have as strong of ties in the local community or an understanding of the local economy.
Improved visibility
According to UpCity’s 2024 Elusive Online Consumer Survey*, 21% of online consumers typically end up purchasing products on internet search engines. This is why you want to ensure that your website appears often in search engine results. Local SEO leverages standard search engine optimization tactics to ensure your website, through content improvements, technical design improvements, and other SEO tactics, performs better when customers seek out local businesses and service providers.
Increased brand awareness
Increased visibility goes hand in hand with an increased awareness of your brand. Local SEO is designed to ensure your website appears more often in search results. When consumers consistently seek out products or services in your industry and your brand appears highly ranked in SERPs as a result of local SEO, there’s a higher likelihood that they will start to search out your brand.
Increase your review generation and credibility
Filling out your Google Business Profile (formerly the Google My Business page) and other search engine profile pages, as well as directory listings relevant to your industry, are perfect platforms to solicit and host customer reviews. Making review generation a central tenet of your local SEO strategy will—over time, due to Google’s ranking algorithm— improve your rankings.
With Upcity’s 2024 Elusive Online Consumer Survey revealing that 30% of consumers believe internet search engines are the most trustworthy sources for product reviews*, you can’t afford not to prioritize review generation in your local SEO strategy. Increasing the number of reviews about your brand across local directories and social media pages will provide your organization with the necessary boost in social proof to increase your brand’s credibility.
Capitalize on mobile optimization
It’s become clear in recent years that there is an intersection between mobile search optimization and local search engine optimization. While statistics vary over the last few years, the most recent data available shows 60% of searches take place on mobile devices. [2] This makes mobile optimization of your website and online directories a vital tactic for local SEO, as Google’s data reveals 30% of all mobile searches are related to location. [3]
Conversion rate optimization and increased ROI
Local SEO success depends upon the fact that customers performing local searches are highly engaged and very likely to become customers. This increase in overall conversions will naturally lead to an improved return on the investments you have made in improving and optimizing your website to drive local traffic.
How to build your local SEO strategy
The steps to building out your local SEO strategy are similar to establishing strong search engine optimization practices, with a few steps focused specifically on generating traffic from local consumers.
1. Set up your Google Business Profile page and directory listings
Your directory listings online, especially your Google Business Profile, are powerful drivers when it comes to building local traffic, and they are integral to a well-structured local SEO strategy. Using these platforms to make your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) consistent and visible across multiple platforms improves your site rankings in search results due to how the Google algorithm prioritizes accurate information, especially in local search inquiries.
2. Research your competitors and target audience
Local search engine optimization, at its core, is concerned with attracting and converting local consumers. That optimization can’t take place without detailed information on the types of consumers who are actively seeking out your brand locally and which of your competitors they are currently prioritizing. Local SEO is straightforward because it’s a limited playing field so the competitors are well known, but challenging because those businesses are competing for an extremely limited advertising space.
3. Conduct local keyword research
Local keyword marketing functions at a different scope than standard SEO-focused paid keyword marketing. For large organizations or businesses operating across borders and timezones, the range of keywords and long-tail keywords a business includes in a given PPC campaign can be quite broad.
For local SEO, however, local small businesses are competing with national and international competitors for a much more limited range of keywords that help to dial into the search behaviors of local consumers. This means that success in local SEO requires detailed and thorough research into the community- and industry-specific keywords most likely to generate results.
4. Optimize your local content creation
As with standard SEO practices, content marketing plays an important role in the success of local SEO strategies. Just as with standard content marketing, locally-focused content should be crafted to appeal to the right target audience. Local content should heavily leverage locally-focused keywords and be crafted to provide solutions local consumers or businesses are trying to solve in order to improve and cement your brand’s credibility and boost awareness.
5. Engage with your local audience and encourage reviews
Local SEO is as much about being involved with the community as it is growing your customer base. Strong backlinking through community engagement focused websites and social media pages to your own website can help drive local traffic, as long as you’re seen to be contributing to the overall success of the local business community and the local economy. These platforms are ideal for engaging with local customers and inviting them to leave reviews about their experiences with your business.
6. Find the right local SEO tools to support and optimize your strategy
Local search engine optimization is a complex process that requires the ability to collect, correlate, and analyze data from across multiple platforms. In order to parse data on that level and effectively leverage the resulting insights into an effective local SEO strategy, most SMB marketing teams will be turning either to local SEO tools and software solutions or agencies that specialize in their usage. To find an SEO-focused agency skilled in the use of the proper tools to support your needs, check out UpCity’s SEO Service Providers directory.
Invest in local SEO today and reap the benefits through the year
According to the 2022 Gartner CMO Spend and Strategy Survey, 45% of respondents planned to increase their marketing spend on SEO that year. [4] This level of commitment to SEO in a general sense is a clear indicator that SMBs understand the importance of optimizing their digital assets for improved performance in user search results, but local SEO helps those same small business owners to compete in an arena usually dominated by larger brands with deeper pockets.
To learn more about how local SEO is an affordable and accessible means of digital marketing in the modern economy, read what the UpCity community of experts has to teach you about growing and stabilizing your customer base with proven local SEO strategies:
Sources
- Top-Performing North American and U.K. Field Marketing Channels, Gartner
- Desktop vs Mobile vs Tablet Market Share Worldwide, Statcounter Global Stats
- What showing up on Google Maps means for your business, Google
- Fundamental SEO: 9 Tactics to Improve Organic Visibility, Gartner
Methodology