2022-03-07 | 1109 
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There are over a Million customers searching for local small businesses per day on search engines and approximately 84 percent of prospects require digital capabilities to facilitate brand transactions. Without an executed local business SEO presence, you are missing out on valuable leads, traffic, and sales opportunities.
Recommended Read: Small Business Local Seo Services
Local SEO is the process of improving the local search visibility of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), brick-and-mortar stores, and multiple-location businesses within a geographic area. Local SEO marketing is a vital engine in the SEO marketing endeavor, especially for small businesses targeting local customers. In this tech age where everything is done via mobile, it will be wise for small businesses to optimize their services on search engines for this purpose, the funniest part is that you may not need to own a website to actually rank on search engines for local searches.
Google Maps (formerly Google Local) looks for physical addresses mentioned in regular web pages. It provides these results to visitors, along with business listings and maps. Product-specific search engines use techniques such as targeted web crawling and direct feeds to collect information about products for sale in a specific geographic area.
Local SEO services can help your businesses attain more reach and find prospective clients that are searching for a pertinent keyword related to your service, a good example can be seen in the image below via Google Search engine we can see a list of Google maps associated with different businesses that have registered and claimed their businesses on Google my business for the keyword "Colorado springs website companies".
Recently, Google is now giving more preferences for Location search and bringing up maps to represent and find a business for this set of keyword categories. I am certain you would have seen a lot of businesses coming up online for location searches as well, this should not be mistaken as your normal SEO, as the processes of ranking for local search are now shifting and redefining the criteria of local SEO ranking factors.
If you have found this type of search on Google as illustrated above, they were obviously optimized for Local ranking and the best way to go about doing the same for your small businesses is not as difficult as some SEO frackers may put it to be. Simply follow the guided list of local SEO ranking to see how you can improve your business listing on search engines take this guide as your local SEO audit list.
Get an Email Account: This is the first thing you need to have if you are actually serious about doing business, with this you can actually register for local search listings on other search engines as well, eg Yandex do offer local listings alongside Bing and if you are going to list with any of them you are required to have a working email address. You are not required to have a private email address, it can be your regular one, but it is left to you to consider it as an official email address to transact your business with, I will prefer to use Gmail for this with respect to Google local listing.
Visit Google My Business: You have gotten the right email that will represent your business, the next is for you to work on registering your business on Google My Business
You will be prompted to fill in the correct information about your business and your correct services with a time of operation, please note, selecting the right category for your business is very crucial. I will advise when doing so you should avoid selecting a generalized category that is not specific, they tend not to get enough search. The next thing you need to do is to verify your business address and add your product and office images to all this are presented to your targeted audience to have a brief preamble of what your company do and offer when they click on your listing as seen above to get a slide through detailed information about the business alongside your weekly or daily post.
Typical your visitors will have a Google Map display of every website listed for the keyword, in our case, it is "SEO", and will only preview the top 3 results (well optimized for local ranking) depending on the viewport of the searcher. We are ranked number two for this keyword but registered under a category for a Marketing agency in Nigeria, how peculiar is that? a simple search for this category will not pull our listing out, but a listing for SEO in Nigeria or Lagos or an SEO marketing agency. Please note: This results as observed do shuffle more due to the personalization search integration by Google, especially when you are logged in to your G mail account...this is the factor that accounts for the Organic (not set) keywords in your Google Analytic dashboard.
Back in the days to rank for local SEO was quite a thing of setting up your target country in your search console, and if you had a local TLD or keyword like Prestigefreighschicago.com you are on a good track in ranking your website for local searches, as it was then Google.com was a TLD for the US default search URL while if you were to be in the UK or other countries your Google.com will redirect to its local country TLD eg Google.co.uk. I guess the experiment did not go quite as expected and the elevation of the Google map to be integrated as part of the local search suffice, mind you the cause of this is simple. From my observation, when you optimize for Google.com and achieve a ranking there, the weight you will get on your local TLD has little or no recommendation impact, hence people are less likely to optimize for other TLD of Google (The sites will find themselves on local ranking equally).
Based on these explanations, we can establish the fundamental difference between Local and Organic SEO: local SEO is about optimizing for locations, while organic SEO is about optimizing for content. They both have to do with optimizing your website and online presence for search engines.
local SEO strategy or tactics you can apply to improve your online presence are to follow the steps outlined above and now add up your website, if you have a website then try to include on the website your Google map location or provide a link to it, this has been one way to go about it and also on the Google My Business profile page includes your website and do make update post, Google support content with over 500-word count, it is as good as writing a mini blog post with a link back to your website. These simple local SEO tactics are mostly ignored by agents providing local SEO services for small business
The following are a list of confirmed Local SEO ranking factors that have been proven to work for small businesses seeking to get their businesses found on search engine (Google). For more insight, you can read this wonderful post on GOOGLE MY BUSINESS UPDATES AND FEATURES FOR LOCAL SEO.
I am a seo web analyst and have a love for anything online marketing. Have been able to perform researches using the built up internet marketing tool; seo web analyst as a case study and will be using the web marketing tool (platform).
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