UPDATES FROM BLENDED DIGITAL

WHAT IS LOCAL SEO?

...AND WHY IS LOCAL SEO IMPORTANT?

Local SEO helps your business stand out and helps drive more business through online leads.

These leads are from people who are specifically searching for your products or services, as a result they are likely to result in a higher conversion rate. 4 in 5 consumers now using search engines to find local information.

Local SEO also helps drive people’s decisions in favour of your business. The more information they have about your business before they visit, the more trust that has been established.

Today’s customer can now get the opinions of hundreds of people in seconds through online reviews. The truth is customers today have access to more information than ever before allowing them to research without any pressure. All of this is good for the customer as it makes their life far easier.

Even if a local business is recommended by a friend, many will still check out the business online before making contact. One stat we find fascinating is that 78% of mobile local searches result in offline purchases. So not investing in your online visibility is no longer an option for any businesses looking to grow their revenue.

INVESTING IN LOCAL SEARCH

High-performing local businesses have worked out how important investing in local search marketing is. Google recently found that small and medium businesses that are making the most use of online are 2.8x more likely to enjoy business revenue growth than those who do not.

Failing to adapt their businesses to succeed in this new online-first approach can also lead to business failure.

The goal of your local search investment is to help you generate more leads online, whether that’s by getting more phone calls, emails, or walk-ins.

Achieving the best return on investment can be achieved by a practice called local search optimization or “local SEO”. This helps your business rank higher on search engines when people are searching for your services. These are the kind of leads your business wants because they’re self-qualified and have a genuine need for your services.

Any business that serves customers in a specific location needs local SEO.

HOW DOES GOOGLE WORK

So, when we look to improve rankings on Google we first need to understand what Google wants. Quite simply, all Google wants to do is give the person searching the best possible result for their query.

If we dig a little deeper into this, Google uses a local algorithm to work out which results they think are best, and it’s broken up into three simple elements:

Proximity - This is how far away your business is from the person making the search. Proximity is a metric that you can’t control or influence; you can’t decide where somebody searches from or what city they search for.

Relevance - This is how well your online presence matches what has been searched for.

Prominence - This is how Google determines which business has the most trust through a variety of elements such as reviews, links, content, etc.

Google uses different algorithms for the two types of results you see when you make a local search.

The first is for the local pack results, the three Google listings that sit at the top of the search engine results page (SERP), below the paid ads.

Google has a separate algorithm for the organic results, which are the blue links you see below the local pack. These organic results are still based on the location of the searcher or query, so we call them localised organic results.

We can see that Google My Business makes up 25% of the signals.

This is a free listing that Google gives you to control. If somebody searches for your business on Google, this is what will appear on the right hand side of the page so it’s normally the first thing prospects will see when they look for you online.

If your Google My Business profile hasn’t been properly optimised then you’ll never succeed in local search, period.

Get your free Local SEO report above and see how your business is performing.

Blended Digital Limited
Office 43, Trafalgar House
223 Southampton Road
Portchester
Portsmouth
Hampshire
PO6 4PY

Phone
+44 (0)23 9347 5900

Enquiries
info@blendeddigital.co.uk

Office Hours
Monday	9:00AM - 5:00PM
Tuesday	9:00AM - 5:00PM
Wednesday	9:00AM - 5:00PM
Thursday	9:00AM - 5:00PM
Friday	9:00AM - 5:00PM

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