Beating the competition online is difficult regardless of your niche. If a product or service is worth buying, competition to sell those products and services will be stiff. That doesn’t mean a carefully crafted marketing campaign can’t position your business online at the
top of Google, ahead of your competitors. Which is exactly why you want to know what is local SEO as there isn’t a more effective method for quick and powerful results than targeting local consumers.
What Is Local SEO and Why?
In today’s world, consumers constantly use mobile phones to search for the products they need. Google – and other search engines – now use local search algorithms to help consumers locate products nearest to them.
So if you live in Boston and need a plumber to service your stopped up toilet, when you search on your mobile phone or computer for a plumber, the results will display plumbers in your area.
Google now tracks location so that when you use its search engine, you will view the most relevant search results based on your current location. If your website isn’t properly optimized to attract local search engine users, the amount of lost revenue could put you out of business fast.
How to Properly Optimize a Website For Local Search Results
Now that you are aware of the importance of local SEO, let’s take a look at how to optimize a website for local search results.
The key to local SEO is to target as specific of an area as possible.
For example, if you are an insurance agent in Chicago and sell exclusively to residents of the state of Illinois, you would want to target key phrases such as “Illinois health insurance quotes” instead of just “health insurance quotes”.
Other potential key phrase targets include:
- “Chicago health insurance quotes”
- “Peoria health insurance quotes”
- “Champaign health insurance quotes”
In the above example, we targeted the state of Illinois and some cities in the state. The reason for that is so when search engine users anywhere within the state of Illinois look online for health insurance quotes, your website will pop up regardless of where the consumer is located.
Businesses that only service a very specific area would have a different approach to local SEO.
For example, if you only sell health insurance to Chicago residents (and, yes, I know that’s unlikely, but in this hypothetical scenario we’ll say so), there is no point in targeting Peoria/Champaign/etc. because you wouldn’t want to receive calls from someone located in those cities.
You COULD target “Illinois health insurance quotes” but you might receive calls from those outside Chicago.
Shooting Down the “I sell worldwide
so I don’t need local SEO” Argument
I’ve heard many business owners claim they have no need for local SEO because they sell worldwide/nationally.
It seems like a valid argument and I see their point, but I completely disagree with this philosophy. Remember what I said about how Google – and other search engines – track a user’s location? Even though you are selling all over the globe/country, you’ll still miss out on website traffic from local searchers everywhere.
That doesn’t mean you have to target every city in every state and every country. But it would be a smart idea to go after certain big cities such as Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, etc.
Or you could target certain countries or states with a large volume of consumers likely to purchase your products as you unlock the secrets to what is local SEO.
Guy Siverson
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