The Importance of Local SEO for Small Businesses

Are you a small business owner who’s ready to take your SEO digital strategy to the next level? Local SEO best practices, including geotagging, citation management, listing management, and locally curated content, can make a huge difference in your organic digital marketing. Localized searches including “near me” or “close by” have increased by over 900% in the last two years.

Many small business owners underestimate the power of search engine optimization and even more importantly, localizing it for people in their area. Local searches are immensely powerful for small businesses – over 46% of people search for businesses “near me” when looking for something new.

While this is a brief introduction to the importance of local SEO, there are many ins and outs to creating a marketing strategy for localizing your SEO and curating content for local relevancy.

That’s what our team at Vervology is here for! We’re your marketing gurus to help you navigate every step of creating a marketing strategy for localizing your SEO and growing your business to new heights.

These days, everybody uses Google or another online search engine. 97% of consumers find information about a business online rather than anywhere else. More importantly, most people that find what they are looking for online visit the local business the very same day.

What is Local SEO?

Localizing your search engine optimization means that you curate your search engine ads and content for locals to find and interact with your business. This is best utilized for businesses that have brick-and-mortar locations and can create “geo-tags,” which allow users that are nearby to find their business when they search for “[type of business] near me.” If you service a specific area but don’t have a specific business location, you can create “geo-fences” around the community you serve.

30% of all mobile Google searches deal with location services, so even if you already have SEO marketing in place, it may be worthwhile to introduce geo-tagging and localization to your SEO marketing efforts.

Why Does This Matter for My Small Business?

You may be thinking to yourself: I already have content on my website, I have an online presence via social media, and I have an easy-to-use website – why should I do more?

Online search engines carry the highest conversion rate to sales than any other digital marketing strategy. Though all these factors are important cogs in the marketing strategy machine, localizing your SEO and making sure your business is available on online search engines is not only important, but imperative. Local searches result in sales over 28% of the time.

It should be a top priority for your small business marketing strategy to localize and optimize your search engine marketing. Most people aren’t going to click through several pages of local businesses; they’re going to click on one of the top 5-8 results. 

How Is This Already Helping My Competitors?  

Feel free to test our theory. Go to Google (or your favorite search engine), and type in “your business type” + “near me.” See what comes up.

You might find that your competitors are ahead of the game with their local SEO strategy. This is an excellent way to review what your competitors are doing for their search engine strategy, try a few different keyword combinations to see if different competitors are ranking higher than others for different keywords.

Pro Tip: Try this from an incognito browser window for highest accuracy. Your browser remembers the websites/businesses you visit often.

Do you feel like this is a waste of your time? You’d be surprised at how much business your competitors are receiving from being ranked higher on local searches on Google. Around 32% of all clicks go to the top result. That’s a ton of visibility you’re missing out on by not optimizing your local SEO strategy.

How Can I Utilize Local SEO to Work for Me?

Local SEO is not only about placing advertising dollars around keywords and geo-tagging your business. You should always have a digital marketing strategy in place to stretch your hard-earned dollars to their optimum capacity.

Why pay more than you need to get the same results?Utilizing an all-encompassing local SEO strategy that includes curated content creation, keyword research, and a continually optimized marketing strategy for your client base is key to having a successful marketing campaign and seeing those strategies convert to sales.

Why You Should Outsource Your SEO and Marketing with a Professional Agency

Many business owners believe they can manage their SEO marketing strategies on their own, but what they don’t know is how much research and re-configuring a successful digital strategy requires. As a small business owner, you have bigger and better things to worry about, like growing your business and increasing sales.

We just have one question for you: Why waste money by optimizing SEO without a plan?Here at Vervology, we help manage your Google listings for you, as well as create an all-encompassing digital strategy that actually works. Our team is happy to answer any questions you may have about Vervology, like what our name means and how our experts can make your business stand out with local SEO best practices.

Let us help you take your small business to the next level with our listing management, citation management, and reputation management services.  Our organic digital marketing services can help you convert your advertising dollars into paid clients and sales. Contact us today.