Word of mouth and local advertisements are a great way to attract customers from your area. But online search can be equally impactful, so if your business doesn’t rank in local search results, you could be missing out on valuable traffic and customers.
In other words, local SEO could be the key to staying relevant and growing your business.
If you’re fairly new to local SEO, you might have a lot of questions and you probably won’t know where to start optimising. This guide shows you some essential local SEO solutions and helps you understand the landscape better.
What is local SEO and why do I need it?
To understand the local SEO definition, let’s first try to understand what local search means. Local search is when someone searches for businesses, products, services or any additional information relevant to one specific location. They could be searching for “concerts near me” to find an upcoming concert in their city or “best painting service in [location]” to find a painting service nearby.
In other words, local search is more specific to a certain location compared to general Google searches. And Local SEO refers to the process of trying to optimise your online visibility to show up in those local search results.
Local SEO is crucial because it helps you:
Boost your online visibility
Bring in more foot traffic to your location
Attract more targeted traffic, which improves your chances of conversion
Enhance your credibility and build trust
Organic search results vs. local snack pack
One of the ways that local SEO enhances your online visibility is through the local snack pack results. Google sorts out local search results into three sections – sponsored, snack pack and organic. While the sponsored results appear prominently at the top of search results pages with the “Ad” or “Sponsored” label, they cost money.
The snack pack results follow, appearing in a box that highlights the top three business listings related to that particular search. This shows up more prominently than organic local search results, which means there’s a better chance of visibility if you get featured in the snack pack.
And the best part is, not every local search page features sponsored results. So your business could sit prominently at the top of the search results page, as you can see below.
The organic results are further down, below the local snack pack results. So even if you rank on the first page of local search results, you might not show up as prominently as the businesses that manage to get featured in snack pack results.
The goal of your local SEO strategy should be to rank on the first page of organic local searches as well as in your local snack pack. This ensures optimum visibility and improves your chances of attracting targeted traffic.
We understand how to captivate your customers by creating exceptional websites, magazines, social media, emails, video and content, always going the extra mile to deliver work we are proud of, that your customers love and which generates response for you and your business.
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