7 Reasons Why Local SEO Should Be Your Focus in 2017
Do you have a physical location that you want human beings to voluntarily show up and spend money at? Will your business benefit from being found? Is air important to you? Why Local SEO should be your focus in 2017 or 2018 or beyond is why we’re here today. Not all of your focus but a big part. Here’s why.
1. Less Competition With Local SEO
When it comes to local SEO, the competition is instantly reduced to a handful of organizations and websites. This is because the keywords you target become “location-specific,” which is a great advantage (thanks in part to Google’s intelligence). Instead of competing with websites across the country or globe, you are now pitted against just a handful of local businesses. Chances are good that not many of them have had professional SEO help.
2. Easier Keyword Targeting
With local SEO, the focus is on longtail keywords and geo-specific keywords. Instead of trying to rank for the keywords “dentists,” with local SEO you’d be targeting “dentists in Seattle,” which changes the whole equation of competition and keyword targeting. With longtail and geo-specific keywords targeted, keyword competition is vastly reduced, making it easier to compete and achieve top rankings.
3. Better Conversions With Local SEO
Microsoft’s report in 2010 stated that smartphone users are more likely to convert quickly. This year, Nielsen reported that about 64% of smartphone restaurant searches converted within an hour. The essential point here is that all of those were local searches for local listings. Local businesses get better conversion rates through local search results. This applies not just to the smartphone ecosystem but to every other device people use to search Google for local business listings. One important thing to note is that conversions have been shown to sharply drop off when pages load slowly; mobile users have little patience for waiting for websites to load.
4. Less On-site Optimization With Local SEO
Local SEO is more about what is popularly called “citations” — non-link mentions of your brand name, address, and phone number, examples of which include getting listed on directories and obtaining good reviews. Traditional SEO techniques like a blog and quality links from established local websites certainly helps, but these are icing on the cake.
5. Ready-Made Solutions Availability
There are services like Whitespark’s Citation Finder, Yext (which automates and manages citations across a plethora of directories), and plenty of other tools to assist local SEO efforts. Since most local SEO companies use these popular, successful, and time-tested services, the time investment needed to achieve results is substantially less than with traditional SEO.
6. Faster Results
Results in SEO cannot be guaranteed, but many observers agree that local SEO efforts get faster results. Interestingly, not many websites (and their businesses) understand the advantage of getting faster results for their SEO efforts: this effectively means less expenditure, because time is money.
7. ROI and Ongoing Processes
Local SEO has a very high ROI because most local businesses are physical service providers, and people looking for the services in a particular city are more likely to turn into customers faster. With less competition (in most cases), better chances of listing on Google and other search engines, and an optimized website, local businesses can easily leverage the “trust” factor.
