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Local SEO optimisation has quickly become a popular and reliable digital marketing strategy for any business across several sectors, with local search queries one of the most used search methods by consumers. This method being looking for quick solutions/products near their location through their search engine, this method accounts for 46%, nearly half of all online searches, is influenced by localised queries/factors. As such, this is a vast amount of potential business that you cannot afford to miss out on.
Local SEO services can significantly boost your business’s online visibility, driving targeted traffic and leads to your website. Regardless of the size or strength of your competitors, local SEO acts as a level playing field by focusing on geographic relevance and site optimisation. Enabling any business to compete in local search results based off their geo-convenience and SEO efforts.
For those that may be new to this, time-poor or wanting for the best localised optimisations, it may be best to work with a specialised Local SEO Services agency.
What Is Local SEO
Search Engine Optimisation is a digital marketing tool in which optimises a site’s content, technical performance and structure quality, to improve its ranking and exposure on search engines. SEO is a difficult, expansive and ongoing process that requires strong analysis, strategy development and technical knowledge. Localised SEO, as a specialised subset of SEO, focuses solely on ranking higher in local search results, its goal to improve visibility for businesses that operate in a specific geographic location and attract local customers.
For small-medium sized businesses aiming to capture a local market with their physical location or serve customers in a specific area such as restaurants, event venues, contractors, butchers, retail stores and so forth, local SEO is paramount to achieving this.
How to Pursue Local SEO
Now why should a business pursue local SEO, we know the generalised strategic reasons, but these could be applied to nearly everything, so below we will cover the specific benefits which may be applicable or more desirable to yourself.
With nearly half of all searches being localised and every search made online accounts for your location immediately, Google and other engines do this to provide more relevant results to the consumer. Given these businesses have no choice but to become competitive in their local SEO, so as to not be discounted against and lose potential business. For example, consumers take into greater consideration the Google My Business profile (GMB), this meaning the location pins on the maps, photos, address, testimonials/reviews of your business and contact information. As a form of verification for your business’s legitimacy and goodwill, it will lead to an increase in the quality and number of calls, leads and further sales by converting this nearby interested traffic.
An example of this increased sales is the increase in physical traffic to your store as those who search for “___ businesses near me” will see your location, star rating and business information. Easily convincing them to investigate your products and make a purchase if persuaded.
Strategies that are essential for this effort to begin to display and rank for this is the keyword optimisation in your content as well as mobile optimisation. People who search for “clothing stores central London”, “best hairdressers in Pimlico” or “best photographer London”, are generally searching on their mobile devices. As such ensuring your site is mobile-friendly first, coupled with the fact that Google uses a mobile-first indexing when ranking sites, if you wish to rank strongly you must ensure your site is mobile-optimised. Furthermore, content which is locally relevant and optimised for these keywords is imperative, location-based keywords such as city, borough or neighbourhood into your websites titles, blogs, meta descriptions, videos or case studies helps tremendously achieve this locality.
A promising strategy to increase the local traffic is to build links from other credible sites to your own, with increased citations and external links this can help win over potential customers with your credibility and legitimacy. Attracting high-quality links from well-established sites such as community sites, influencers or local news outlets, carries their SEO strength into your site, increasing Google’s confidence in you. Another avenue is to place citations of your site and grow the testimonials of your business on directories, industry forums and critic sites, such as Yelp, TrustPilot or TripAdvisor.
Local SEO services are designed to drive traffic to your website, whilst converting these visitors into repeat customers. As a local SEO expert, we recommend enhancing the overall customer experience, improving the architecture so that the site is easy to navigate, contact you for quotes or queries, and make seamless purchases/subscriptions.
Importance of Hiring an Agency
It is important to note that SEO progress doesn’t happen naturally, it is an ongoing process of constant visibility and assessment, which can be difficult to commit the time plus expertise to realign and adapt the strategy.
GMB optimisation can only take you so far, local SEO is a strategy that demands multiple avenues of approach such as linking, content and architecture optimisation. It is wishful thinking to simply plugin your name, address and phone number and expect great results, people rarely trust those without updated photos, consistent reviews, easy user experience and pages that rank so far removed from first page. Rather confusingly, over-optimisation can also be an issue as Google distrusts your intentions, reputation and longevity of your business. It is worthwhile avenue to consider trusting an SEO agency to help you as they have expertise in devising and correcting a strategy that fulfils your goals.
For business owners or department heads juggling several projects and objectives, partnering with an external agency for SEO can be a opportunity to save time and minimise disruption to your work load. Whilst hiring an in-house SEO expert is an option, it often comes with high costs, lengthy hiring process, contracts and integrating this employee into the team. But, hiring a SEO agency in London offers a more cost-effective avenue, achieving quick results and larger workload shared amongst a team, saving your business money in the long run.
Additionally, the value of an external agency is the wealth of varied experience and qualifications from a team verse a single employee, POLARIS is a long founded local SEO expert agency operating in the heart of London, with a skillset across many platforms, coding languages and forms of content.
As a local SEO consultant, we specialise in identifying the key areas of London to target, tailoring a strategy that ensures your contracting services are promoted in the most effective locations achieving the highest value. For product-based businesses, we take a holistic approach optimising product, landing and homepages, helping you to rank higher in search results and drive this interested traffic to the relevant pages, streamlining the consumer journey so that we convert these strong leads into sales.
Conclusion
For those who would like to begin the conversation about their local SEO projects or those struggling to get your local optimisations correct, please contact us here.
For those who would like to learn more about local SEO strategies, to investigate what you could implement, please click here.
