Why is local business SEO so important?

As a small-business owner, it’s vital that you consider just how effective local business SEO is and the effect that it will have on your business. Even if you’re trying to operate globally, it’s essential that you invest time in perfecting your local SEO practices. Here’s why.

Building relationships and partnerships

One of the other crucial benefits that local SEO has is granting you the ability to build partnerships with other local businesses.

This helps to boost both of your businesses by deep-linking to each other and to boost your social media engagement rates. This helps both businesses to grow in a positive and collaborative way.

Small-scale exposure

Small-scale exposure of your business to customers can be just as effective as international exposure. For example, as a local business, you want to make sure that everybody in your area knows about you and will know exactly where to turn if they’re looking for products or services that you provide.

You can even advertise on websites like Angie’s List, Yelp and Craig’s List, once again boosting your local SEO ranking. For example, if you were operating globally, but based in Australia, you can custom design your URL to look like www.australianhelp.com, www.helpling.com.au, www.absolutedomestics.com.au or www.bigassignments.com.

Desktop and mobile usage

More and more people are using mobile and wearable devices in comparison to desktop devices. Essay Roo recently conducted a survey and found that 96 per cent of PC owners will conduct local searches* for businesses in their local areas and, in fact, 46 per cent of all Google searches and related to local area searches.

Additionally, 78 per cent of all mobile searches will result in an offline purchase**. These are figures that cannot be ignored and show the importance that local SEO has.

Local content

With these statistics in mind, it’s easy to see why local-related content is such an important aspect to consider as a small business. As with all kinds of SEO, the content that you create and write has a direct impact on your SEO ranking, and it’s vital that you consider this.

You need to make sure that your content is relevant to your local area as well as the SEO basics of getting the content right, plagiarised and of high-quality content. You can ensure this quality using online grammar guides, such as State of Writing and Via Writing. The higher the quality of your content, the higher you’ll rank in the search engine result pages.

The bottom line

As you can see, there are many aspects that go into local SEO and many reasons as to why it’s important for your business to consider. By customising your business practices and content, you can perfect and maximise your sales opportunities in your local area, taking your business to new and exciting levels of success.

*https://www.brightlocal.com/about-local-seo/
**https://searchengineland.com/study-78-percent-local-mobile-searches-result-offline-purchases-188660

Brenda Berg, Managing Director – Corporate Strategy & Business Development, AeroBase Group