How can Local SEO help your business grow?

The power of Local SEO is often underestimated.

With Local SEO also doubling down as a great way to improve your overall SEO and AI SEO campaign, it’s a great idea to get ahead of the game and make sure your Local SEO is better optimised than your competitors.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is an optimisation technique implemented on your website to help your brand appear in search engines and AI models for local searches related to your business. If users were to search for your product or service and combine it with a location, or Google considers where they’re searching from, Local SEO makes it more likely for your website and brand to appear closer to the top of search engine results pages and AI overviews for those local terms.
 
There are a few different ways to approach Local SEO, but we’ll focus on the core foundations you need to get started:

Google Business Profile

First, setting up a Google Business Profile is incredibly important. This is so you can publish your business information such as your address, opening times and contact information. A Google Business Profile also enables you to receive reviews, which is additional, detailed information for users to see and is helpful for your SEO and AI SEO.

If users search for your business by name, your profile will occupy a large amount of real estate in the search engine results pages, displaying your business information for all to see. In fact, 60% of smartphone users have contacted businesses through their Google Business Profile. There’s no catch to setting this up – it’s completely free.

Keywords & Content

Next, having plenty of local keywords and localised content on your website will go down a treat. To rank well for searches with local intent, you need to publish content that is locally focused. Whether that’s a dedicated page targeting your local area, or blog posts that highlight your services in your town or city, it needs to be high quality content. You can’t stuff your content with local keywords and expect the job to be done; you still need to satisfy search engines and AI models with useful content.

Being distinctive

If you’ve read up on Google’s approach to E-E-A-T, this is a great set of standards to base your content around. By showing experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust in what you do, this will capture the attention of search engines and AI models. While E-E-A-T itself isn’t a direct factor for ranking or being cited in AI models, creating content that embodies these principles is crucial for satisfying other vital ranking and citation signals, particularly by providing genuinely unique and high-quality insight that builds user trust.

If you don’t have the time to create high-quality, Local SEO content, we’re able to take care of that for you with our content writing service.

The strength of Local SEO

So, how powerful is Local SEO? Whether you run a local shop or offer a service in your area, it can be a game-changer.

• For local stores, 76% of users who make a local search on their smartphone will visit a business within a day, and 28% of those searches result in a purchase. If you’re a local business with a store, Local SEO is a great organic tool to help increase the amount of footfall you receive.
• For local business that provide a service, Local SEO is still as useful. Given that 46% of all searches now carry local intent, you need your business to be discoverable locally, helping you receive more organic traffic from the vast number of specific local search queries Google processes daily.

The benefits of Local SEO for SMEs

With the huge amount of local searches that take place every day, let’s look at why we believe you NEED to be considering your approach to Local SEO.

Why is it good to be visible to a local audience?

This is a simple question to answer, and one that you most likely already know the answer to. More visibility means more brand awareness, more attention around you, more website visits and eventually, more conversions.

The more you want your business to grow, the more accessible you need to be. Gone are the days of Yellow Pages; 97% of users that want to find a local business search online for one. The opportunity to be discovered is there – you just need to make sure you’re doing the right things to rise to the top and show up.

Why do searches with local intent have a higher conversion rate?

When users make searches with local intent, they’re usually after something in particular, rather than just doing some general research. Because users who search with local intent typically need a product or service in a more immediate timeframe, this can lead to a higher conversion rate from your website traffic.
 
Searches with local intent can skip out the research phase, placing your business in front of users at the end of the buyer’s funnel just as they’re ready to make a purchase. This is why getting Local SEO right is vital. For people that are looking for local services quickly, establishing your business as one of the most trusted in the local area can significantly boost the number of sales or enquiries you receive.

How does Local SEO build trust and credibility?

How to optimise your website for Local SEO

We’ve been over the importance of a Google Business Profile, local keywords and creating local, high-quality content, but we’ve got a couple more things on our list to tell you about too.

Mobile optimisation

We drone on and on about mobile optimisation in our blog posts, social media posts and the pages of this website, but we can’t stress enough how crucial it is to have a website that is responsive to different screen sizes. From design to development, it needs to be accessible, usable and easy to navigate. If your website isn’t easily usable, potential visitors and customers will click away. More critically, a poor mobile website experience can directly and significantly impact your search engine ranking ability, meaning potential customers may never even see you online.

Local links

Building local links is a crucial component of any effective Local SEO strategy. This involves acquiring backlinks from authoritative websites that are relevant to your geographic area such as local business directories, community blogs, chambers of commerce, and regional news sites. These types of links signal to search engines that your business is not only credible but also locally relevant.
 
The benefits of local link building are twofold:

• Enhanced Domain Authority: Backlinks from reputable local sources contribute to a stronger backlink profile. Search engines view these links as endorsements, which can improve your website’s authority and help it rank higher in local search results.
• Increased Local Visibility: By appearing on local platforms that receive good amounts of traffic, your business gains exposure to a highly targeted audience who are more likely to convert because they are geographically close and actively seeking local services or products. This visibility can lead to more website visits, foot traffic, and ultimately, more customers.

Overcoming Local SEO hurdles

There are things you’ll need to monitor to keep search engines happy and ensure your business’ information is on display as much as possible.

Firstly, your business information needs to remain consistent across the web. If you’ve changed your contact number, email, or postal address, you need to make sure this is up to date wherever you have published your details online. Whether that be directories, social media profiles or even your own website, (yep, this happens way too often) the information needs to add up.

Why? If search engines see different information, they don’t know what to believe. If they are provided with conflicting data and can’t make their mind up, they might not show anything. Ensuring your business’ Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) are consistent across all online platforms is a fundamental step in your Local SEO strategy, making it easy for both search engines and customers to find accurate information.

Poor-quality backlinks are another common issue that could quietly drag down your SEO efforts. We’ve touched on generating local backlinks, but you can’t just get yourself placed on every local directory you find. If these sites have no authority with search engines, it can negatively impact your backlink profile. If your business appears on websites that are nothing more that lists of links, this can also look like spam. You can check that a link from a particular website will be positive for your backlink profile by using an SEO tool or by asking your favourite digital marketing agency.