Internet commerce has grown manifold. Today businesses are willing to ship products globally, literally offering services from Hawaii to Moscow and building relationships around the world. While global business is offering a great opportunity for income growth, small businesses has taken their eyes off the best piece of showcasing their products and services: their own region.
Optimizing small businesses to amass local interest has been pushed down for global marketing, a fact which many businesses are beginning to realize now. They are quickly changing their process to cater to the local markets and customers. Local SEO is really important for the growth of small businesses, but why? Let’s address this question.
1. It marks your existence
A preference is given to businesses with locally optimized Google, Yahoo or MSN business pages basically because it is more exacting for customers wishing to transact locally. Google has a facility of local search features turned on in it. For example, for customers looking for ‘model trains’ driving two or three miles to find them makes more sense since shipping from UK is more expensive. This is the reason why Google adjusted their algorithm to favor localization and the process is still on.
2. Simplifies the content marketing efforts
If you spend a lot of time on optimizing the content for search visibility, you can readily slow down your efforts and optimize content specifically targeted for the local audience. This involves writing news of interest to the local audience, showcasing other businesses and discussing on events that may evoke consumer interest. As your business website will transparently define the categories, your brand name and what products or services you offer, writing content no longer depends too much on LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), keyword density and other related issues. So, you just need to write factually.
It means you can focus on writing useful tips related to your products and services as opposed to unethically farming better search positions.
3. Offers validity to your business
Suppose you spend a handsome amount of money on search marketing; but will this effort of organically ranking high for keywords truly validate your business’ existence or put an end to consumer fears? It won’t. A full disclosure of contact information, customer reviews and address confirmation through maps better speaks of your validity, no matter what.
4. Enhanced mobile interest
Users are increasingly using mobile devices while traveling and here comes your opportunity to truly shine. Since mobile customers can look for businesses and use click-to-call features, having an element of localization will promote your business naturally. This is because when logged in your mobile device, Google and Apple record permission-based localities.
5. Quicker conversion of leads
To be honest, you cannot simply convert locally by spending money on national advertising campaigns. This is because big brands already dominate television, radio and huge portion of search positions. People are more interested in places around them and by optimizing your business presence with local SEO will result in greater conversions.
Customers prefer spending their hard earned money locally as it gives them a sense of economic stability. As such, local SEO offers a great potential to the growth of your business.
