Currently, consumers rapidly use online search engines to find brand locations for products and service needs. This means how frequently consumers shop brand locations heavily relies on local SEO strategy. A strong local SEO strategy helps brand locations appear in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) effectively, attracting many customers to stay competitive with other, often larger brands.
10 Local SEO Stats
- 46% of all Google searches have local intent. (Source: Safari Digital). Missing local SEO strategies mean your business won't appear in almost half (1.6 billion) of the Google searches.
- Nearly 97% of people learn more about a local company using the internet. (Source: SEO Tribunal). People want to know about the company even before making contact. Thus, companies with high online search visibility get to spread their company image easily among many consumers.
- 72% of consumers that performed a local search visited a store located within five miles. (Source: HubSpot Marketing Statistics). It means people tend to visit stores closer to them, and optimized location pages can greatly influence that.
- Mobile phones will influence more than $1.4 trillion in local sales by 2021 (Source: Forrester). Therefore, websites that are optimized for mobile devices will contribute more to local sales.
- 88% of the consumers who search for local businesses on their mobile either call or visit the business within 24 hours. (Source: seoexpertbrad). Appearing your business name and contact information in local searches improves the customer turn up.
- 92% of searchers will choose businesses that show up on the first page of local search results. (Source: SEO Expert). Because people do not like to spend too much time-on-page navigation. A strong SEO strategy is key for appearing on the first page of the SERPs.
- "Near me" mobile searches rose by 136% last year (Source: Safari Digital). Both 'Near me' and 'Close by' have become very popular over the past years. Therefore, businesses that adapt to such searches have a competitive advantage over their counterparts.
- 86% of customers use Google Maps to find local businesses (Source: Safari Digital). These statistics prove the importance of having an optimized Google My Business Profile as part of your local SEO.
- 73% of consumers trust a business after seeing positive online reviews. (Source: SEO Tribunal). People often want to see your business from other peoples' eyes, and the regular involvement of happy customers in your SEO strategy will positively impact local SEO.
- By 2021, Global retail eCommerce sales are expected to reach $4.5 trillion. (Source: HubSpot Marketing Statistics). Therefore, small and medium businesses need to invest time in local optimization strategies to take advantage of such huge future sales growth.
How to Improve Local SEO
Make your website mobile-friendly
As we saw from the above stats, mobile phones will highly impact local sales in the future. Here are some things you can do to optimize your website for mobile.
- Make sure that your mobile page loads faster and quickly becomes responsive to user interactions.
- Optimize the UI by using 'thumb-friendly designs'
- Ensure the fonts are readable. Use larger fonts wherever possible
- Use 'responsive design' to adapt the website for any mobile devices
- Improve page navigation using easy-to-navigate components like Hamburger buttons
Use a Google My Business Account
An optimized business profile in Google My Business is a great way to improve the visibility in Google searches and Google Maps. First, create your Google My Business Account, providing all the required information following the guidelines given by Google. Here are some tips you can follow to optimize your Google My Business profile:
- Include most up-to-date and accurate information
- Ensure you include your business hours, images of your shops, products and services, and payment methods.
- Include location page URLs
- Motivate customers to provide positive feedback and promptly responds to the consumer reviews
Location Page Optimization
The location pages provide important business contact information, physical store locations, and product information. An SEO-optimized location page helps to rank the local business higher in search engine searches. Make sure to create separate pages for each location and include location-specific content.
Optimize the page by Including up-to-date NAP data, a google map of your location, images and videos, product descriptions, and effective call-to-action. In addition, you can use an optimized URL for the location page and Schema markups to improve the local SEO.
Optimize the web page for voice search
According to Voice search statistics, voice searches will continue to grow in the future. Therefore, you must optimize your websites for how consumers ask questions when searching for something. The majority of languages have differences in speaking and learning. It means even if your content fits regular search by typing, you also have to adjust your content to fit the people's tone of voice.
Use online Business Directories
There are many online business directories out there to include your business details to improve local SEO. For example, business directories like Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, YellowPages, LinkedIn Business directory, etc., have a good domain rating. It means, if you add your company details like name, address, the phone number to these online directories, your visibility for local searches highly improves.
Create location-specific content
Another way to improve local SEO is by creating content based on local news and events to get the attention of the local customers. You can write blog articles on specific events, activities, and special news stories and create videos, posters, and social media posts about special events in the local area. If you have location pages specific to each area, you can include those location-specific content about new and events to attract more local customers.
As tech evolves rapidly, businesses need to optimize websites for local SEO, Brickwork is the all-in-one solution for multi-location brands aiming to dominate local SEO, increase revenue, and streamline workflows. Contact us today to learn more.