What is “Local SEO”?
If you were living in the 19th century and you would have liked to have a sale festival for your local customers, how would you inform them? Probably, you would have changed your store showcase and used your local supermarket’s board to do that. If you want to do the same in the 21st century, how can you apply that? you need to get familiar with “Local SEO”.
If you have a local business and you are looking to attract local customers, you have come to the right article! In this article, we try to explain what “Local SEO” is and what are the challenges you may encounter to achieve that.
Let us start with the definition of the local SEO, before we go through the steps of how to optimise your website for it. We suggest you read the “SEO Procedure in Australia” article before continuing reading this article for better understanding.
What does Local SEO mean?
Local SEO helps you introduce your business to your local customers. It means that if your business is located in Sydney CBD, customers from this area can find you easily with a simple search! By applying this method, you can find the customers who are very close to your location and increase your chance of doing business with them.
What is the difference between Local SEO and SEO?
Let us give you an example to specify the difference. If you search for “the best restaurants”, you will see general results, however if you search for “the best restaurants in Sydney CBD”, local restaurants in Sydney CBD will be displayed for you.
The purpose of users is an important subject on which Google is working hard to understand more. In the restaurant case, Google understands the user’s intention which is the restaurants located in Sydney CBD.
By Displaying Sydney CBD’s Restaurants Only, Google Tries To Enhance The User Experience.
Local SEO means:
- An opportunity to attract customers who are close to our business location
- A “Better introduction” and “Detailed Information” about your business
Now that you found out the meaning of local SEO, you may ask whether local SEO is important for all websites or not?
The answer is NO! you will realise the reasons shortly.
Why Local SEO is important and becomes more important every day
Statistics show that 46% of the users who search for a specific subject, are from a specific location! Users are now more likely to search for something in an area (Like Restaurants in QVB). The good news is that you don’t need to compete with all websites in the world for “Local SEO”. You have a better chance to succeed because you are competing with a group of local businesses. So, you can flourish with a good strategy in this case.
Have you ever thought about how the results of Local SEO will be displayed?
Google shows 3 local results in a separate section. This is called “Local Pack 3”. You can see an example below:
As outlined in the image above, it has a different appearance and includes below details:
- The website score (By users’ vote)
- Exact location of the website or business
- Working hours details.
- Users’ review about the websites (That would be chosen randomly based on the keywords users have searched for)
As mentioned above, the appearance of this section is different and they have a better click-rate than others. This means that if you can place your website there, you will have a great chance to get more visitors.
Keep in mind that this table would be displayed, if the search keywords are local based only, similar to the example below:
How can we optimise our website for Local SEO? (For Australia and a regional Market)
Now that we talked about Local SEO, it is time to talk about how to apply it to your website.
Firstly, do NOT ignore appropriate coding and internationally accepted standards to be applied to your website.
Some people wrongly believe that to optimise their website from an SEO point of view, modifying the website based on the SEO standards and regulations is enough! Even though this is needed for a website to be optimised, it is not enough as in addition to SEO improvement techniques, website standardisation and appropriate coding is needed for any kind of SEO too. Otherwise, you’ll get nothing but wasted time and money.
You can check “Web-Design Services” for more information.
1– On-Page SEO Optimisation is a Required Background for the “Local SEO”
What you do on your website is more important than what you do out of it! That’s why we’ve always been insisting on on-page SEO, before trying to optimise for Local SEO. You can check SEO Services in Australia for more information.
Choosing the right keywords for each page is one of the most important factors for on-page SEO. By reading the “Investigate for Keywords” article, you can make yourself more familiar with on-page SEO.
2- The Local Directories are the best solution for the Local SEO
There are some websites in Australia that gather information of all local businesses in a page. As an example, bestrestaurants.com.au provides information about all restaurants and cafes across Australia, and Google knows it. By placing your website in that kind of directories, your business will be represented beside your competitors and if you perform better than your competitors, you may have a better result.
There are some other examples of directories in Australia such as “Google My Business”, “Yellow Pages”and so on.
3- Ask your satisfied customers to leave a comment or review on your business.
There is an unwritten rule in online marketing, saying that, if someone talks about a website, others will be encouraged to do so! It means that if you ask your customers to talk about your business in media, it will have two advantages for you:
- Social singles are effective on SEO indirectly!
- Other users will be encouraged to talk about you.
4- Optimise your website Google Map
You may have seen that some Google search results show “Google Map” results in the “rich snippet” for you. The more the information in this place is detailed, the more users will trust you! “Contact Page” in Company Web Design is the best place to add contact information and sync data with Google Map.
We, So far, talked about “Local SEO” to get you more familiar with the concept. Even though the Local SEO concept is wide with lots of points to learn, we assure your business significant improvement from your local customers, only if you take the steps we have discussed here.
FAQs
What is the Local SEO?
If you have a local business and you are looking to attract local customers, you have come to the right article! In this article, we try to explain you what is the “Local SEO” and what are the challenges you may encounter to achieve that.
What does the Local SEO mean?
The Local SEO would help you to introduce your business to your local customers. It means that if your business is located in Sydney CBD, customers from this area can find you easily with a simple search! By applying this method, you can find the customers who are very close to your location and boost your chance of selling products to them.
What is the differece between Local SEO and SEO?
If you search for “the best restaurants”, you can see normal results, however if you search for “the best restaurants in Sydney CBD” you can find only local results for that.
The purpose of users is an important subject which Google is working on that recently. In this case; Google understands the intent of the user which is about the restaurants located in Sydney CBD.
By displaying only Sydney’s restaurants, Google tries to enhance the user experience.
Local SEO means:
An opportunity to attract customers who are close to our business location
A “Better introduction” and “Detailed Information” about your business
Why the “Local SEO” has become so important recently?
Statistics show that 46% of the searchers are related to a specific location! Users are now more likely to search for something in an area (Like Restaurants in Sydney CBD). The good news is that you don’t need to compete with all websites in the world for “Local SEO”. You have a better chance to succeed because you are competing with a group of local businesses. So, you can flourish with a good strategy in this case.
How we can optimise our website for the Local SEO? (For Australia Market)
1- On-Page SEO Optimisation is a Required Background for the “Local SEO”
2- The Local Directories are the best solution for the Local SEO
3- Ask your satisfied customers to leave a comment or review for you
4- Optimise your website Google Map
