Local SEO and its importance for your SME

If you are a company owner or have a physical business, let us tell you that you must be up-to-date and know everything about local SEO. Currently, Internet search engines give great importance to the quality of the results based on the needs and geographical location of the users.

Search engines like Google are becoming interested in the local market of small businesses and the location of their web pages, both in large and smaller cities. If you want to know what is one of the most effective ways to reach more customers, the key is in Local SEO.

That is why it is essential that SMEs know everything about this essential strategy and that they can apply it to benefit their business, improve their visibility on the Internet and attract new customers.

What is Local SEO?

Before defining what, local SEO is, first of all, it is convenient to explain what SEO is. The word SEO is an acronym for “Search Engine Optimization,” which in Spanish means: “optimization for search engines.” It is a synonym for web positioning, a term used very frequently.

For its part, Local SEO is “search engine optimization” but focused or directed towards a specific geographical location.

It is a set of positioning techniques to increase your business website’s visibility, all based on the geographical location from which users search.

Local positioning consists of appearing in the top positions of Google for specific locations. Keeping your business well-positioned will allow you to promote specific products or services.

Thanks to technological advances such as GPS, Smartphones, and the internet, users make all kinds of purchases through the web. Therefore, local SEO is crucial for your business to thrive.

Positioning techniques allow that when someone searches for the type: keyword + geographic location (or even just placing a keyword), Google detects the search intention and shows the best results based on where the person is.

When users use a search engine to locate a physical business, they don’t even have something specific in mind. Just entering the keyword is enough for Google to detect its location without typing it.

Why is it so essential to improving local SEO?

If you have a business in a specific town, you will surely want to attract customers. But it would help if you kept in mind that local SEO is the tool that establishes which businesses are shown first to a person, depending on the site they are on and the words they search for on the internet.

For example, if a user searches for a word like “restaurant,” the search engine will show nearby restaurants that have applied the best local positioning techniques and strategies.

Local Seo is so important: it is focused on making your business stand out from the rest in user searches. Without a doubt, this will allow your business to advance and help you increase sales.

How to make and improve Local SEO?

There is high competition in the local positioning of companies and businesses. That is why it is becoming increasingly essential to do and improve local SEO since it allows you to differentiate yourself and stand out. Next, we will give you some advice in this regard.

Optimize On-Page SEO

Performing SEO On Page optimization is essential to improve local searches. This optimization refers to introducing our location in the web content.

The advantage offered by SEO On Page is that if you can position a keyword, you will appear twice on the first page of Google: on the map and as an organic result.

A series of aspects must be taken into account that will directly affect the optimization of SEO On Page. Among them are:

It is necessary to indicate the city’s name, the company’s location on the labels, and how to get there. To boost your Local SEO, the site’s name must appear in the title, description, web content, URL address, and categories of all the photographs used on the web.
Keywords with the business’s name must appear in all the content created.
The name, address, and telephone number must be indicated. It is recommended that these data appear on each page of your website.

Create an address list on Google My Business

There is a platform called Google My Business responsible for managing local businesses and their presence on the internet. It is a crucial tool to improve your local SEO since it also includes the services of Google Places and Google +.

Therefore, you must register your business with Google My Business. You must fill in all the data without making any mistakes.

Subsequently, you must verify that your business appears on Google Maps and include your business data (name, address, and telephone), the city, and the sector (for example, web development).

Consumers use much information about business hours, payment methods, and categories. It is also essential that you register this data since it will allow your business to be found more easily.

If you want to know more information about Google My business, you can go to this other article by clicking HERE

Invite your customers to leave ratings and opinions

Positive ratings and opinions have a significant contribution to improving your local SEO.

Search engines like Google take customer reviews, reviews, and opinions into account. And is that the evaluations facilitate the search for the information requested by the consumer. The companies that have the best reviews and ratings are those that are in the first results.

Google My Business offers the advantage that customers can do reviews, which will be visible in local search results.

Likewise, social networks are essential to get the best opinions. That is why you must have a presence on all social networks through a corporate profile. Your business must appear on Facebook, Twitter, and other famous networks. Here customers can leave their opinions.

Positive ratings are a crucial factor for local SEO. When choosing the services of a specific business, many clients rely on the recommendations and positive opinions about that company.

Local SEO for SMEs (small and medium-sized companies)

If you are the owner of a small or medium-sized company, you will have noticed that there is more and more business competitiveness. Every day it becomes more challenging to get clients, but there is a solution.

To get an increase in sales and leave the competition behind, marketing is the solution. But it is not enough for your business to have a website and a corporate profile on social networks. Good local SEO is also essential.

As we have already seen, positioning techniques are fundamental since they will help your company to be in the first search results.

Suppose your company (whether small or medium) has excellent local positioning. In that case, your visibility on the internet will increase, you will have brand recognition, fixed investment, and high profitability, and therefore you will find more customers, which is very important, many more customers. They can find you.

SEO vs. local SEO

We must consider the company’s location when we use web positioning techniques. For example, it is not the same to position the website of a single florist in a city as to position the website of a chain of florists that work worldwide. It is where we find the differences between SEO and Local SEO.

Local SEO applies more to businesses with a physical presence, aiming to improve internet positioning against next-door competition.

On the other hand, SEO or global SEO applies to companies worldwide, such as Amazon, which sells to the whole world. In this case, optimization techniques are applied to position the web in different countries with their different languages.

Conclusion

To conclude, you have to think that local SEO is essential if you do NOT want to have an invisible business on the internet.

Giving your SME more visibility and notoriety, whether a restaurant, gym, kiosk, or any SME in the sector you operate, is currently FUNDAMENTAL if you want to retain your customers and generate new customers.

Local SEO is an essential tool to make your business successful. Start today to boost the positioning of your company on the internet, and you will get more customers.

Local SEO work is quite laborious, so it is often advisable to have professional help. However, it is worth all the effort and investment. The results are excellent.

Local SEO Agency

A local SEO agency can guide companies to improve their positioning and design a unique marketing strategy to achieve that goal.

Métrica SEO is the local SEO agency in Tenerife. We advise local businesses to improve their visibility on the internet thanks to local SEO positioning and strategies.