Good local SEO is becoming increasingly more important to businesses. According to Think With Google, a whopping 76% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby, visit a business within a day!
So if you’re not actively marketing your business through local SEO, you’re missing out on huge amounts of traffic and business every day. Here are a few areas that you should be focussing on.
Google My Business
GMB is a great place to start for local SEO. It’s a free business profile from Google that lets you set up your business information for people searching for what you do.
For example, if you’re searching for ‘coffee shop leamington’, amongst the 816,000 results, you’ll see 3 coffee shops located on a map. These listings show information such as how far away they are, opening times and even reviews.
These 3 coffee shops haven’t just arrived at the top of the list by chance, it’s all to do with local SEO. By optimising their business information that they have provided to Google, they have been able to stand out from the crowd by showing in the ‘Map Pack’.
But why is this worth it? Well, compared to a ‘normal’ search result, there is a lot more information about your business available to the searcher making them more likely to come to your business.
Optimising for Local SEO
Statistita reported earlier this year that 52.2% of all website traffic comes from mobile searches. On top of that, mobile searches including “near me” or “where to buy” have risen over 200% from 2017 -2019 (Think With Google).
That’s why optimising for Mobile Devices has become so important for Local SEO. If your website isn’t optimised for mobile, you’re not going to show up when someone searches for what your business does.
So how do you optimise for local SEO? You target the locations you operate in. For example, if you have a shoe shop based in Manchester and somebody nearby searches “shoe shops in manchester”, you want to be found.
By optimising your website to focus on Manchester, as well as having your GMB Listing, Google will know your website is the most relevant results and show it to the person searching.
More Local SEO Stats
- 72% of consumers that did a local search visited a store within five miles
- 88% of searches for local businesses on a mobile device either call or visit the business within 24 hours
- 61% of mobile searchers are more likely to contact a local business if they have a mobile-friendly site
- 18% of local smartphone searches led to a purchase within a day, whereas only 7% of non-local searches led to a sale
- 92% of searchers will pick businesses on the first page of local search results
This all proves that it’s more important now than ever to be appearing in local search results. And if you’re not, you’re missing out on valuable business.
Contact Us about Local SEO
As SEO specialists, we work with clients on optimising local SEO everyday. If you need some help getting optimised for your business, give us a call on 01926 358 200 or fill in our contact form here.
