Why is Local SEO Perfect for Small Businesses?

When you have a small store or business establishment, whether a restaurant in Houston, a flower shop in Paris, taxi service in Singapore, or a grocery store in Angola, local SEO plays a critical role in helping these businesses generate customers and successful conversions.

Obviously, as a local business owner, there may feel little or no point in investing your money and time in boosting your Google presence. Especially when the competition on Google is against big, international brands like Uber, Amazon, Walmart, Zomato, etc. based on your specific industry.

This thought may be true for organic search engine listings, but it’s a different matter entirely for a local business.

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the approach and process of increasing your business’s reach via your business’ website by ranking it at the top of the organic search engine results. This optimization of search engine results can be done through many activities, mainly divided into two sections: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

In simple terms, search engines like Google have bots that “crawl” through the internet to find the perfect results for the users’ search query. Now, SEO is all the actions like tweaking the title tags and meta descriptions, etc. to show these crawling bots that your website has the best result to the users’ search query.

The search engine algorithms analyze web pages based on hundreds of ranking factors or signals, and SEO is the art of making you rank through all those factors.

What is Local SEO?

Local businesses need a local SEO approach, but what is the meaning of local SEO? With local SEO, you will target keywords that define your business and include a local element like the city or state name. For example, if you own a furniture store in Alabama, you will want to rank for keywords like “best furniture store in Alabama” or “Most popular store in Alabama.”

The main benefit here is that your competition is cut down from the whole world to only the businesses in your state or city. So, you don’t have to be worried about the big brands around the world, only the competitors in your city.

Benefits of Local SEO for Small Businesses

Optimization

The biggest benefit is optimizing the site. SEO, when done to a deeper extend, meets more than just Google’s criteria. It also tries to optimize the business website in ways that would improve the readability in terms of the human experience.

Easy Listing

Google My Business is the most prominent business directory that is actively helping local startups and establishments in listing their business online easily, and for free.

Increase Business Visibility

Good SEO treatment will improve your business’ visibility in Google Maps & Local Search Results. This way, you can be sure that the people viewing and interacting with your business’ digital platform are much likely to access your service as you are close to them.

The best way this visibility works is on location. For instance, people in your city will search like “best pizza near me,” and they will show your Pizzeria.

Ratings & Reviews

There are code scripts that you can add that show having quality ratings and reviews to make your business look more trustworthy and reliable. Based on these ratings and reviews, the search engines would push your listing above other listings considering your higher ratings and reviews.

Gaining New Customers & Customer Retention

Suppose your local business’ reach was once limited to a couple of blocks in radius, with a digital presence and local SEO. In that case, your business can reach a large new customer base that spans across the whole city or even the entire state based on competition. Such local online listing can bring you to more potential customers than you can ever reach with a physical store.

Conclusion

So, these are the benefits of using local SEO to give a boost to your small business. The cost of setting up an SEO team or even hiring a single SEO strategist is quite low compared to the rest of the marketing and advertising budget. Make sure that unless you are savvy with the latest SEO techniques, it is best to leave such tasks of local SEO optimization up to the professionals.