Most businesses provide their services or sell goods in a limited number of cities and areas. In order to attract as much organic traffic to their website as possible, owners need to use so-called “local SEO”.
As an example, a company that provides a service to rent aerial towers or an online store that sells building materials. It is unlikely that the owner of the business to rent aerial towers will be profitable to send a machine with a tower in another city or a user who needs 10 bags of cement will be profitable to order it to send to another city. The owner is interested in maximizing profits, and the user is interested in saving money. Therefore, both will want to provide or receive their service and goods in the region in which they are directly located. This is where local SEO can help the business owner. Let’s understand it in more detail and local seo cost.
What is local SEO?
Local SEO is a strategy that allows you to rank high in search results for queries that clearly indicate a specific location or city.
Approximately half of all queries are local queries. In addition to queries with a specific city, these also include queries that include “near me”, “near me” and other similar phrases.
Often, the effect from promotion by local queries appears much faster than from general queries, because competition is lower, and therefore requires less time and effort to achieve good positions.
Local queries usually have a lower frequency than general queries. However, due to traffic for local queries, a site can get a lot more conversions than if you try to cover general queries. And local SEO allows in certain regions to get ahead of major competitors that monopolize the output of general queries.
How to show the search engine that the site is relevant to a particular location and get ahead of the competition?
There are several mandatory factors to consider when promoting your site locally.
Google My Business
Google My Business is a service of the Google search engine that is essentially a directory of organizations. All the organizations that are registered there are displayed on maps and can be displayed by the search engine in the local search block:
This block includes organizations that are close to your location.
This is one of the easiest ways to tell the search engine which region you are serving customers in.
By adding your organization you can also provide information about yourself, your services and products, and answer users’ questions. Users can also leave feedback about your organization, which can encourage potential customers to contact you rather than your competitors.
An example of a well-designed organization card with lots of reviews:
A Google My Business organization card has a huge impact on success in local organic search results. It provides the search engine with as much information about you as possible, and your activity and reviews may reveal information about the quality of your services and how you are reaching your clients that may be considered in ranking your pages for local queries.
Local search queries
When gathering the semantic core, in the process of analyzing your site and niche, you need to understand what potential your business has in local and global search. If the local potential is more, then the emphasis should be placed on queries with the toponym and queries with the occurrence of “near me”, “near me. The first type of queries has very high frequency, in some niches even higher than the general query. For the second type, the situation with frequencies in the CIS countries is not very good yet, but everything is moving towards the fact that soon these queries will become no less popular than general text queries. Therefore, it is worth taking them into account.
Local landing pages
If your business provides services in several regions, a good option to cover them all would be to create pages for each region. This way, you can distribute queries across the site much more effectively. For example, if you are a photographer and you are willing to go from the city you are in to two or three neighboring ones, then creating pages for each of them can help you take higher positions in the local search:
Well, or perhaps you have some large goods for sale, but you do deliver to neighboring regions, then creating local pages would also be a good idea.
Internal optimization
A very important part of site promotion is its internal optimization. And one of its main elements – the optimization of meta-data and content.
For local SEO there are nuances in the optimization of meta tags and content.
As you know, the title should begin with the most important and relevant search query, followed by the occurrence of auxiliary words to qualitatively describe the page for the user and the search engine. Local SEO requires that the title title contains the name of the region being promoted:
This occurrence will help the search engine understand that this page is relevant to the queries of users in that region.
As for the content, it should also be present in the region in which the services the company promoted. This is also one way to show the search engine relevance of the page to local queries.
LocalBusiness micro markup
You can read more about what micromarkup is in our article “What is micromarkup?”.
What we’re going to look at now is a separate type of micromarkup called LocalBusiness.
This type of micro-patterning allows you to mark up information about your company. Phone number, address, hours of operation, company branches, type of payment accepted, service territory, etc.
There are a lot of subtypes of this micro-patterning. You can read more about them at schema.org.
If we’re implementing this micro-pattern, for example, on a cleaning services site, it would be logical to add a block with types of services, etc. Adapt the micro-patterning to your site type.
As a result of implementing this type of micro-patterning in the code of your site, there is a chance that you will be displayed in a block with local companies:
You can also get traffic to your site from this block, which is never a waste.
Local backlinks and mentions
The volume and quality of the link mass leading to the site is very important in site promotion. For local promotion of a site it is very important to link to local quality and authoritative resources. To effectively promote the local promotion it is necessary to build up such links. The easiest way to find a site with the help of competitor analysis, most likely they have links from local authoritative resources.
Also, in addition to links to local resources, it is important to mention them in local directories and directories. Placing on such sites does not require much effort, and in the future may bring very good results, especially if the site has a good audience and they can leave reviews. For cafes and restaurants, Tripadvisor can be a good example. This service has influence and credibility. Users can search for the establishment directly there, so the presence in this directory is necessary. Also, a link from there is a good signal for the search engine.
Such mentions and links can help grow brand traffic as your company becomes more popular in the regions.
Link mass needs to be built up on an ongoing basis anyway, but if you want to rank as high as possible in local results, you need to focus your efforts on local sites and resources.
Conclusion:
Local SEO is an important part of website optimization for businesses that operate in a particular region. An essential part of it is actively working with the organization’s Google My Business card. Other local sites with user reviews and questions, links from local authority resources and directories are also taken into account. But do not forget about the internal optimization of the site for local queries, it can increase the chances of reaching the top.
Practice shows that it is easier to take high positions in the local search results than in general queries. This is why we recommend that all young companies focus their efforts on ranking in the region where they serve their clients.
