Significance of Local SEO In Your Online Marketing Strategy

When you want your business to prosper and survive in a competitive market, you need a fool proof online marketing strategy that covers both the local community and the global market.

Many times, the online business owners are so busy luring customers from around the world that they ignore the ones that are right under their nose – the local consumers.

For a successful online business, it is important that you regularly evaluate your online marketing strategy to make sure that you are focusing on driving local as well as global traffic to your website.

Why Do You Need Local SEO?

The online market is changing rapidly and to survive in the market and hold on to your position, you need to make sure that you keep yourself updated. If you still marketing like you are in the 1990s then your strategies need to be re-evaluated and changed to suit the Internet marketing trends of today. With good local SEO, you can give your website the competitive advantage and fully leverage the local market. If your business mainly deals with the local consumers then implementing local SEO in the right way is essential to keep your business alive.

If you own a website then having the basic knowledge about the building blocks of the local SEO is important to ensure that you are always on the right track. Local SEO involves building strategies that help target your business, products or service, and website and make it easily accessible and visible to those who are physically close to it. Local SEO is important to the businesses that sell to the local community, such as a beauty salon or hardware store; and also to those who sell tangible goods to local people and customers around the world; for example classic cars, boats, real estates, and so on.

Vital Elements Of Local SEO:

The building blocks of a local SEO campaign are pretty basic but they might become complex depending upon your requirements and the type of business. Even if you have a comparatively small local business, we would recommend that you have a website with your own domain name as this will enable you to project the visibility of your business in the online market. Some of the important elements of the Local SEO are as follows:

• Website – a good one earns your respect and traffic
• Blog – it works like the lifeline of your business and helps you connect
• SEO Content – search engine optimized content works like magic
• Google Places – boost the visibility of your business
• Social media promotion – connect with your customers and be accessible

Website:

When it comes to local SEO, your website is one of the most important elements and the proper designing of your web page will not only earn you respect but also improve traffic. Those who visit your website and find it impressive will most likely bookmark the page and visit again. To start with, you must make sure that you don’t put your business website on free hosting. Spend some time to create an impressive website because the first impression is really important; you may consider hiring a professional to do this for you. Navigation of the website should be easy and all the sub-pages should be well connected to the homepage to give your customers a pleasant experience.

Good content is very important so fill your website with quality and informative content, without overdoing it. Google always makes changes to its algorithm, but one thing remains constant – a website with good quality content always gets rewarded for the hard work. So, make sure that your web pages have informative content, and they are properly linked to enable Google to access them. Also, don’t forget to create a XML sitemap and place a robots.txt file to boost the visibility of your website.

Blog:

To maintain your rank in Google, you need to make sure that you include updated and new content to the website frequently and this is possible through a blog. You may add a WordPress blog to your website with a professional template and hire a writer to do daily posts to that blog. You may also make blog entries yourself and always remember to include the latest news, promotions, coupons, offers or special posts regarding the local community events.

SEO Content:

When creating a local SEO campaign, you may need to focus on the geographic keyword targeting; this might mean adding “London hair salon” instead of “hair salon.” When your business primarily deals with the local customers, you may consider targeting the products and services to the local community by using the names of your town, city, or neighborhoods.

Google My Business:

When you have a local address, show it on Google My Business to enhance the visibility of your business and enable your potential customers to find you. The listings are displayed on at the top of local Google search web pages with a Google Map and flag. This will help your local customers locate you with ease and increase the profitability of your business.

Be Social! Promote With Social Media:

You can connect with your customers and promote your products or services using social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and so on. This enables you to reach out to your customers and keep them informed about the updates, new products, offers, events etc. It also works like a medium to get feedback from your local customers and improve your business and achieve customer satisfaction. Hence, local SEO works like the lifeblood of your online marketing strategy, especially when your business mainly caters to the local customers.