What Is Local SEO & Why Is It Important?
Local SEO is a highly effective form of online marketing, allowing your business to promote itself to querying customers at the exact moment they’re looking. It uses search engines like Google and Yelp to direct interested parties to your website — and ultimately through your front door.
The processes by which local search operates are a bit complicated, but the simplest explanation is as follows: Think of local SEO as a smaller, but equally important subset of your web optimization efforts, one that focuses on geographic modifiers to get the job done. So, say you search for “best realtor in Dallas” on your desktop — local SEO ensures that Google will provide you with the results that are nearest to you.
Now, more than ever, local SEO helps attract new customers to your business. Local phonebook yellow pages are a thing of the past and have been for sometime. A large percentage of customers seeking out businesses use online search engines. This is even more true for mobile users. In fact, in one study conducted by Google, researches learned that 95% of mobile users look up information about businesses on their phones — in other words, nearly everyone. Not only that, but more and more customers expect to be able to perform a mobile search and make a decision on which product or service they want, almost instantaneously. In fact, another recent study showed that “50% of consumers conducted a local search on their smartphone and visited a store within one day.”
To put it most simply, local SEO optimizes the search process, enabling potential customers and clients to easily seek out your business, even if they don’t know exactly what they’re looking for — or have never heard of your business, specifically. In order to best optimize local SEO for your business, there are a few simple steps you can take. Check back next week when we explore how to take advantage of local SEO — and how to make sure that no potential customer in your area ever overlooks your business again.