What is local Search Engine Optimisation and how can it help your business?

Posted on

What is local Search Engine Optimisation and how can it help your business?

For business owners it is important to fully utilise all of the tools available online in order to maximise potential customers, awareness of your company, and ultimately sales or conversions. Setting up a website that looks great and showcases your products or services is only part of the process, with the next step being making sure your lovely website gets found! Unless your business has an extremely strong and well-known brand name, most potential customers will find your website after using a search engine.

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) refers to a range of practices and techniques that are put into action with the goal or getting a website to rank higher on search engine results. For example, for a company that sold paintbrushes work would be done on the boosting the online presence of the company, on the content, structure and usability of the site along to make sure the site identifies itself correctly as a paintbrush company to search engines.

What is Local Search?

When users enter a search term into Google for products or services, the search engine will return a mixture of local and non-local results. The local search results usually appear as pinpoint on a map with these pinpoints providing information about the business. For small and medium businesses which service their local area, it is important to focus on ranking well within the local search results.  Studies in local SEO have highlighted the importance in getting this right as 50% of local searches carried out on mobiles result in a store visit within 24 hours.

How to prepare for local search

As you can see, it’s clear that local search can be hugely beneficial to local businesses in attracting new customers. Whilst working on local SEO is a complicated on-going process, there are some very simple ways in which you can set up your business for local search success. The most important part of this process is to set up comprehensive and accurate Google ‘My Business’ page. This content in this profile determines whether users local to you will see your business as a local search result, as well as what information is presented to them. The key points of setting up a perfect Google My Business profile are:

  • Google will ask you to pick a category that your business falls into, make sure you pick the one that most accurately describes what you do
  • Make sure the name, address and phone number of your business is not only correct, but exactly the same as is listed on your website.
  • Add accurate opening hours to make sure that you won’t attract customers when you aren’t open.
  • Add your logo and images that suit your business. Be careful about which order Google places these images in to ensure your logo and branding appears as the primary image.
  • Encourage customers to leave reviews. This will provide you with a star ranking which (assuming it’s good!) will attract more customers and result in better local ranking from Google.

Having a strong Google My Business profile can go a long way in improving your online presence and attracting more custom to your business. Whilst there are plenty of other factors which can affect how well your business will rank in local search, an understanding of the importance of basic local SEO is the first step towards making the most of the internet as a tool to raise awareness and attract potential customers.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Patrons of TBC St Albans