The Benefits of Local SEO for Local Business | Vicinus.ai
Whether your business is a restaurant, bank, cafe, or anything else, as long as it has a physical location, local SEO must play a critical role in ensuring that customers find your location.
Although local businesses might find that focusing on marketing against larger corporations such as Amazon and other leading competitors is redundant, local SEO is different. With local SEO, your smaller local business can show up in the local map pack (the top three Google My Business listings) next to- or on top of- leading businesses in the industry.
This is because Google recognises the significance of local searches for the shopping public. This means that local searches for businesses ‘near me’ in your industry will allow Google to show up the most relevant searches in the searcher’s geographic location.
What this means is that smaller local businesses don’t necessarily have to worry about competing against large corporations with budgets for local marketing. Utilising local SEO for your business allows you to get your local business to show up for local consumers near you.
Access suggested that proximity to businesses matters more than we once thought. This is because:
‘92% of local consumers have been known to travel 20 minutes or less to purchase their day-to-day essentials’
From this, we can conclude that local SEO is definitely an area of marketing that local businesses should be heavily investing in.
What is Local SEO for Local Business?
Like ‘regular’ SEO, local SEO is basically a wide variety of different actions and strategies which help to improve your local business’s visibility on Google as well as other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and Ecosia.
There are many ways to optimise for local SEO including, but certainly not limited to, creating content using relevant keywords as well as ensuring that your NAP (name, address & phone number) data is consistent across citations and much more.
For more information on how to optimise your local SEO for searches, please check out one of our previous blog posts: ‘A Complete Guide to Local SEO | Vicinus.ai’
By improving your local SEO, your physical location is more likely to be found by customers near you. This is because local SEO often improves the visibility of your local business by allowing your business to be seen in the local 3-pack of SERPs. These are results that are specific to the local area, or within a certain distance of a physical location.
There are three main elements that contribute to the ranking of your local business in the local pack. These are proximity, relevance, and prominence.
What Are the Benefits of Local SEO for my Local Business?
Improving Online Visibility in Local Rankings= More Traffic and Sales
A citation is simply any mention of your business online. This is usually NAP (or NAP+W) data, which stands for name, address, phone number (and website). For more information on what citations are and the benefits of them, please check out one of our previous blog posts here: ‘What are Local Citations? | Vicinus.ai’
Many of these citations are directory listings and are one of the most common sources of online citations. Make sure that citations are built on sites like Google, Facebook, and other relevant directories like Yelp or TripAdvisor to make your business visible online.
Citations also help your business get found by the right people too. This is because ensuring that your business is featured on industry-specific websites to create citations will help potential customers find your business.
On-site Website Optimisation= Relevant Search Traffic for Local Business
On-site optimisation can help improve your traffic in relevant searches. Like traditional SEO, some requirements hold more weight than others.
One of the best ways to optimise your local SEO is to ensure that you continually revisit your website. This is in order to adjust your on-site optimisation as and when needed. A good way of optimisating your on-site SEO is to optimise for mobile searches as a result of the rollout of Google’s mobile-first index.
Some ways of optimising for Google’s mobile-first index is to:
- Have a mobile-friendly website
- Improve page load speed continually. This drives traffic to your website as slower site speeds are penalised and lead to bounce rates.
- Ensure that full SEO and metadata is on every page of your website.
- Keyword research- this should be on every page of your website as above.
- Monitor keyword rankings and make adjustments as needed.
Not only do these on-site improvements help your local SEO, but they will help your overall business too. This means that they are definitely something to focus on improving about your local business.
Improve Google My Business Signals= Important Ranking Factor for Local Pack
The proximity of your business’s address to the searcher controls your business showing up in local pack rankings. However, this is a factor that is outside of your control.
Yet there is still hope! Other Google factors that you can control will help your local business show up in the map pack. Optimising your Google My Business profile increases the chance of your business getting found online.
Google suggests that:
If your business is verified on Google, you are also twice as likely to be considered reputable by consumers.
In order to maximise your local search presence, you can improve your Google My Business information in search and maps.
Vicinus can help out with this. Vicinus is an AI-powered hyperlocal marketing tool that will enhance your local presence online.
The Vicinus platform features real-time management and the creation of business listings across multiple platforms. Additionally, it provides insights into performance, building and monitoring online reputation, and more.
For full local optimisation, Vicinus also assists in creating SEO-friendly location pages for each of your business locations.
Content Marketing & Link Building= Improve Prominence and Relevance
The prominence as well as how well your business listing matches the searcher’s requirements. This determines how good a local ranking your local business has in a search engine.
The easiest ways to influence this is by:
- Content marketing
- Link building
Local content marketing should primarily focus on creating content that has relevance in your local community. This should focus on keywords that involve towns and cities around your location and local events too.
This will help with the prominence of your local business. But, it will also help to build strong links, loyalty, and therefore customer engagement too.
Reputation Management= Build Trust and Drive Traffic/Sales for Local Business
As we have suggested in various previous blog posts, reputation management is vital to your business on a local and global level too.
Check out our previous reputation management blog posts here.
Online reputation can make or break your business.
Vicinus can aid your local businesses reputation management in various ways detailed below:
Building great business reputation begins with developing trust between businesses and customers. Vicinus helps to create relationships with customers. It is easy to engage with reviews online using Machine Learning Technology and an Auto-Response feature
Increase Reviews from CRM & Website
Vicinus can increase online reviews by drawing from Customer Relationship System and from your website.
Review Monitoring & Machine Learning Sentiment Analysis
Improve customer trust and loyalty by monitoring reviews and responding appropriately.
Vicinus uses Machine Learning sentiment analysis to identify and respond to reviews appropriately. Vicinus’s AI interprets whether a review is positive or negative by analysing the language. This language is key phrases, people, brands, and events.
Review Auto-Responder
Build trust and a great reputation by showing customers your business cares and values them by responding to their reviews.
Vicinus’s Auto-responder responds to customer reviews left on your business listings. This is according to the sentiment data gathered via machine learning and the given star rating.
