How Local SEO can Impact Your Small Business Website

Small businesses already have a lot on their plates; from struggling to keep up with the competition in a cutthroat market to ensure that they're reaching out to the right people, and from building client dependence to managing monetary inflow to ensure growth, there’s a lot to deal with.

And if all of this wasn’t enough, they have to contend with rising competition in the local arena.

Why You Need to Go Local: Understanding SEO

SEO is grounded in the locality. As they say, it’s all about location, location, location.

A large part of getting SEO right for your website is directing your target audience—an audience within a particular vicinity—toward your business. This is especially important if you have a physical facility. You will be looking for customers in the area, and not from around the state, which is where local SEO comes in.

Let’s say you’re running a house painting service. This isn’t an online product-based gig because you’ll be dispatching workers to a physical location. You can only dispatch these workers a certain distance, and not beyond that.

Luckily, house painting is also a service that’s always in demand; there will always be people looking for service exactly like yours. If you’re in the Bay Area, you need only concern yourself with prospective customers from the Bay Area and not in the entirety of San Francisco. Local SEO helps you do that.

Local SEO or Not: The Difference

While Search Engine Optimization usually seeks to convert traffic into customers, local SEO is not concerned with online shoppers per se. If you’re running a small business with a physical location, you’re concerned with making yourself visible.

At the moment, we have some 28 million small businesses employing nearly 120 million individuals. And if that number isn’t daunting enough, we have more: one of the many reasons why 18% of entrepreneurial ventures fail within their nascent years is that they’re outdone by their competition. 14% of these ventures fail because of poor marketing. With small businesses making up for 99.9% of all business firms in the U.S., it’s easy to see why the need to establish visibility and presence as a brand—and as a business—matters so much.

You can’t make any money unless your audience is able to see you—and SEO does exactly that: it makes you visible.

SERPs and How to Show Up in Searches

We’ll go out on a limb and assume that prospective customers for the house painting business mentioned above are typing this into their Google search bars: house painters bay area. Here’s a basic idea of what might show up:

If you don’t see yourself on this list, there are ways to get up there. These websites that Google served as the top results meet all the criteria that are demanded by the Google algorithm.

If you look closely at these results, you’ll notice that mentioning the "Bay Area" has pushed the top two results to their respective positions.

The website that shows up on the third rank does not show any mention of the area when it shows up in a Google search—and that’s not a mistake you want to be making.

You need to ensure, through professional local SEO, that you’re securing the top rank on the first page. 92% of all search traffic is restricted to first page results, according to Forbes. Some 68% of this traffic is restricted to the first five results on Google. Once visitors have selected their website, only 15% of this traffic will try a different website. Usually, they stick to the first website they find.

More importantly, you need to know that prospective customers will be looking at the meta description for your website. No viewer actually reads through all the text that shows up on a Google search.

All they do is scan the search results with their eyes—and they’ll be looking for keywords. One of these keywords would be Bay Area—or whichever location you’re serving. Their eyes will automatically settle over websites that mention the location—and will brush over them if they don’t.

You can no longer just open a store at a street corner, put out a colorful awning and some bright signage, and wait for customers. There will, of course, be the occasional customer who notices your signage in passing, but this setup doesn’t ensure the barrage of customers you were hoping for.

This is because most of today’s shoppers take their business online. This is the era of E-commerce: 1.8 billion people look for products online, and if there’s a local service they’re looking for, they’ll be looking online for it just the same.

Understanding Local SEO

While the basics are pretty much the same as standard SEO, there are some things that will need to be done differently, such as:

Your Contact Details

Your local number, email, postal address, zip code—all should appear on the website. Also, make sure you’re mentioning them on your social media accounts. Adding a local area code and an email address registered on your domain can greatly help.

Also, claim your business on Google Business and post-Google My Business posts regularly in order to tap into local audiences. This gives you an air of legitimacy.

Testimonials and Reviews

People who’re looking for area-specific services will trust reviews from people around them. When it comes to local businesses, 90% of people read reviews prior to making their final shopping decisions.

Ask customers to leave reviews on Google, Yelp and other similar channels, and in Facebook groups.

Food businesses can grow a great deal if a customer posts about them on Facebook or Instagram—which is why, if you’re a new business, you need to focus on being as Insta-worthy as possible. Testimonials will automatically improve your rankings.

Google’s Local 3-Pack

In the world of SERP results, Google’s Local 3-pack is a coveted position. Here’s what it is:

Google lists the most popular businesses meeting the criteria of its algorithms its top results, accompanied by their location on a map.

Viewers are likely to stick to these results since they look more "credible" than other results, due to the simple reason of being pinpointed on a map.

In order to ensure that you make it to this prestigious 3-pack location, the name, address, and contact number of your business should be consistent for all the online directories that you’re enlisted in. If these details aren’t consistent, you won’t make it to the 3-pack.

Third-Party Mentions

Yes, we’re talking about backlinks. If other parties, preferably in your area, are referring to you and are linking back to you, Google will recognize you as a credible business.

It doesn’t even have to be a link back to your website: it could even be the name of your business, your contact details, and so forth.

Let’s say a food blogger who recently ateat your deep-dish pizzeria mentions the name of your business—just the name—in their blog, Google will pick up on it, and you’ll have greater chances of showing up in the prized 3-pack.

About the Author

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Joseph Dyson is a Digital Marketing expert at Searchberg, a digital marketing firm.He specializes in small business SEO services.