All SEO is local.
First of all, let’s define ‘local SEO’. It’s the art of driving traffic in your community via your website to your location. This includes both website traffic and real traffic. After all, since you have a brick and mortar store, you really would like to see some flesh and blood people come through your doors, wouldn’t you?
Also, consider using local citations — business directories, Yelp, Google My Business — and social media to drive traffic to you. We’ll go over those at a later date, since there is so much opportunity with those avenues. For now, keep your attention on what’s on your website to interest your community. And don’t forget to update. A weekly post on Monthly Monitoring of Google My Business has more effect than you realize.
Getting people convinced to come to you used to be as simple as buying ad space on a few billboards. Nowadays, folks are far more likely to do a search on their little smart phones to find what’s available in a certain area. And once they pull those phones out, you want them to find you!
Provide directions.
So, along with the keywords specific to your business (custom cake baker, Rhode Island wedding cakes), add your location in various forms (custom cake baker in Providence, gluten free wedding cakes Providence RI). You don’t need to go heavy on the location keywords, though. One or two mentions in your content and a few more in your image alt text should give you a good start. But wait — there’s more!
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Traffic By The Numbers
A report done in March 2016 by Google presents some pretty mind-blowing statistics. For instance, did you have any idea how many locations are actually visited by people who search for the terms that include those places? Every month, 1.5 billion. Every month!
If you know of some business owners who don’t think it’s important to have a web presence in general, and specifically a small-platform presence, now you can set them straight. Unless, of course, they’re your competitors…
Further on in the Google report, we learn that 30% of all mobile searches are related to location. That makes sense. If you’re looking for a late night place to eat in, say, Greenville, SC, you aren’t likely to care to drive to Greenville, MS. That’s 567 miles, around 9 hours.
Then there’s this: 76% of people who search, visit the business within a day. And of those visitors, 28% will make a purchase. That means that of 100 people who do a mobile search for a particular business, 76 will walk through the door. And of those 76 visitors, roughly 21 people will buy something. That’s huge! I’ve worked on ad campaigns in the past where the business would sell their Grandmas for a positive return of 21%!
Make Your Business Easy To Find
It will pay you enormous dividends to make plain and super-accessible your physical location. Include your directory listing info, too: NAP (the Name of your business, your Address, your Phone number). Tuck your area somewhere in the content of every page and blog post. It can be your region (Upstate SC), county (Spartanburg), town (Moore), neighborhood (Oak Forest), street (Pogue Street), right down to your address (if you have a good security system).
Vary what locators you use, though. There’s no need to open yourself to dings for duplicate content. Plus, the same info on every page is boring. Resist the lure of automated content creation. It’s fast, yes. But it lacks imagination, needs that special something to capture attention. Leave nothing to chance.
Get Discovered. This is your big break!