Why Local SEO is Important to Both You and Your Customer

Why Local SEO is Important to Both You and Your Customer

When you own a local business, and you think about potential customers, you think about local people. If you live in Boston, for example, it would do you little good to have people in Los Angeles see your products or services. You’d want, and rightfully so, customers in your local area to find your business and swarm it. That is why it is more important than ever before to ensure your website has implemented not only SEO but local SEO.

Local SEO is search engine optimization done at a local level and targets your local community to get those local customers coming in. After all, the more the locals see your address and phone number on Google, the better. But how does this get accomplished?

As with most SEO, a good campaign starts with keywords research. However, it is important to note that your keywords research should be going after your very niche market…locally. Let’s say you sell men’s shoes. If you type men’s shoes into Google, you’ll get millions and millions of results, and your website will not be anywhere remotely close to the first page…probably not even on the first 100,000 pages. But, what if you were to localize that? Say you live in Greenville, South Carolina. Type Greenville South Carolina men’s shoes into Google, and the results you get are a lot less. Why? Not a lot of people are looking for that specific term.

Now it might sound counterproductive to go after a term or keyword that not many people are looking for, but the opposite is true. Because few people search for such a niche keyword, it gives you the opportunity to capture the lion’s share of those searching, and they will be led right to your local place of business. These are local people looking for something you sell…locally. It’s far better to get 200 of those searching locally than 0 of those searching with the very broad term that returns millions of results.

No matter what, you have to think at a local level. All components of your website, and even off-page data, should be done with local SEO in mind. It ends up being a win-win as both you and your potential customers benefit. They get what they are looking for, and you get added local business.