There can easily be a lot of confusion around the terms and acronyms surrounding digital marketing initiatives that businesses can undergo these days. There are plenty of times when individuals can feel overwhelmed or confused by such terms that have to deal with strategic and technical search engine optimizations. Today, we’re going to address local SEO and what that could potentially mean for your business.
Local search engine optimization (SEO) gives businesses visibility for geographically-specific searches occurring on search engines such as Google & Bing. When people search for a service or place around them, Google (and other search engines) will display businesses within the user’s locality. The user’s location is determined by their IP address for desktop searches and geolocation for mobile searches. The name of the game here is optimizing based on relevancy to the user’s search query. For example, if someone is looking for a dog groomer near them, then a dog grooming business would want to make optimizations based that search query, “dog groomer near me” or “dog groomer in city name”.
There are two primary methods that give businesses an opportunity to show up within their local market. We’ll dive into Google’s products specifically since they own a primary share of the search market.
- Organic search results (the website)
- Local packs (the Google My Business page)
The process of local search engine optimization take place using both of these methods. The business’s website is the first step. The BARK Firm works on websites by doing local keyword research and optimization of on-page content. This could be something as simple as using geo-modifiers within content or as complicated as marking up the site’s meta information to inform search engines of services areas. Following the aforementioned example of a dog groomer, this could mean building a site where the address of the business is placed in the footer of the website, the headers of the site including “Professional Dog Grooming in Casper, Wyoming”, and meta-information contains keywords such as “Dog Grooming in Casper” and “Pet Grooming in Natrona County”.
The second step is optimizing the businesses online listings (primarily the Google My Business page). A strong GMB page will increase a business’s online visibility almost instantly by making it show up in listings where it didn’t exist before. There are a handful of strategies to further optimize the listing for increased visibility such as keyword research in page descriptions, carefully choosing categories and subcategories, and posting organic content to the listing for increased indexing frequency. Again, this could look like selecting “pet grooming” as a service category, posting examples of the grooming work done, and special offers/coupons to incentivize those looking at dog groomers to come to your location.
The BARK Firm can help you with all these things and have been doing it for years! Learn more about our service offerings as well as clients we’ve helped in the past by contacting us today!