Do you have a local business and want to attract more customers? Perhaps you have heard of local SEO, but don’t know much about it. Here, we will share with you everything you need to learn about how local SEO can help your business.

So…What Exactly is Local SEO?

SEO is Search Engine Optimization. When you do Local SEO, this is optimizing for a local and specific geographic area. If you own a Houston, TX real estate company that specializes in luxury homes, then Local SEO would most likely use a keyword phrase such as “Houston, TX luxury real estate”. Why? Because this is how your customers are going to search for what they need, so they can find a real estate agent.

Local SEO Can Help With More Than SERP Results

While one of the top reasons to do Local SEO, is so your website is optimized and search engines pick it up when people do a search for local products and services, Local SEO actually can do a lot more for you.

Local SEO can actually benefit your social media traffic and increase your followers. Do mention your social media profiles on your website, and this will help your chances of this happening.

Optimizing Your Website For Local SEO

There are a couple of things to put in your local SEO checklist that will help make your site quite appealing for search engines:

1. Responsive Website: A responsive website that can be seen via smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.
2. Local Keywords: Using keywords and keyword phrases related to your location (s) and business niche. But not doing “keyword stuffing”, that is overdoing it on using the keywords.
3. Navigation: Making sure that your website is easy to navigate. If you are unsure, ask your web designer or webmaster.
4. Crawlability: A site that has good “crawlability.” This means websites that can be accessed and crawled through quickly by search engines. Again, if you are not sure, ask your web designer or webmaster.
5. Loading Speed: A website that loads fast and moves quickly. Today’s websites have lots of images and video, which sometimes can make them cumbersome. If you’d like to improve the loading speed, ask your web designer or webmaster.

When your site meets each of these 5 factors satisfactorily, then you have a great chance at doing well with Local SEO. But if you have a challenge in any of these areas – first work to improve them before you start optimizing other areas of your Local SEO.

With Local SEO: Content is King (and Queen)!

One of the top things you can do to help your website is to fill it with high-quality content. This includes written content, photographs, images and video. Why does this matter? It’s rather simple: when search engines go to “crawl” a site to see if it belongs at the top of the search engine rankings, they look for really great content.

When your website does not have excellent content, then they are not going to place it higher up on the search engine result rankings. It’s going to be much tougher to get there.

Creating great content does not have to be complicated. Search engines are looking for content that relates to your business niche topic that shows your knowledge. You also don’t want to do keyword stuffing, that is just forcing keywords into content repeatedly with the hopes that it will rank higher. Those search engines are much smarter than that!

Don’t Be Intimidated By The Search Engines

If you are new to Local SEO, it can be easy to start to get intimidated by the search engines. After all, it feels like they hold a lot of power! They determine if your website ranks higher up in the search results. There is also no one person you can talk to at any of the search engines, to try to explain why your site should rank higher when it doesn’t. You just have to accept the results that come up.

Instead of feeling frustrated by this, try to focus your energy on creating a high-quality website. Think about all of the information you would want to share with a new customer, if they came to visit your business in person, as that most likely belongs on your website in some way. Sit down and think of the top 10 or even top 20 questions new customers most often ask, and create a webpage that answers these. That along on your website is a very high-quality resource that will impress the search engines, as they will see you are an expert on the topic.

Local SEO Helps Your Business – It Never Sleeps

This is the top reason you invest in Local SEO! When you implement it, Local SEO goes to work for your company every single day, including holidays. It never even takes a coffee break.

Make the effort to add Local SEO to your company’s marketing plan. It is an excellent investment in your company’s success!