The main purpose for local SEO is to help a business show up prominently in the search results in Google when someone searches for a particular word or phrase that relates to their business. For example if you own a roofing company in Tulsa, Oklahoma you would want to show up as a search result if someone were searching for Tulsa roofer or roofing company Tulsa or roofer near me.
While there are other search engines, Google and its related properties account for almost 95% of search engine activity so most all SEO efforts are implemented to target Google search activity.
A typical search result on Google will yield 2 or 3 different types of results depending on your search. Many searches will result in some paid advertisements, these are usually at the top of the page and are identified by a small green “ad” box. Each time you click on one of these links, the associated company pays Google a fee.
If the search is for a product or business in a local area, the search results will show a “Maps Pack” which is a box that shows a small map and the top 3 listings in the local maps listings. For several years there were 7 listings in this section a few years ago it was shortened to only 3 making ranking much more challenging.
If you click on the “More Places” link at the bottom of the map it will reveal a number of other businesses located in the area.
The bottom listings are what are considered “organic” rankings. Depending on the nature of the search phrase the organic ranking might be a local result, a national organization or general information sites like Wikipedia. Organic search results can be enhanced by proper SEO techniques often resulting in improvement in rankings where Maps Pack rankings are more affected by actions that occur in the Google My Business profile and other associated Google properties.
Search engine optimization used to be a “brute force” process of seeing how many keywords you can cram onto a website, or into a post or by purchasing thousands of backlinks from link farms in Russia or China. Today, SEO is a much more nuanced process.
Google has never revealed specifically how they rank various search queries, it is known however that they hold over 51,000 patents. It’s also been revealed that Google has over 250 factors that it considers when ranking websites for search results. These include domain age, website speed and many others. See list here https://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors
If you look at a website for any nationally known brand, take Walmart for example which has over 474 million web pages on the internet. This website will have hundreds of thousands if not millions of backlinks.
Even a small regional business is likely to have thousands of pages on their website and thousands of backlinks on their site. These backlinks are like a road signs that people use to be directed around the internet. Google uses these same road signs to help determine the relationship of websites to specific keywords and their relative value. For example of you are a business that sells car parts you would like to have links from say Ford or General Motors. This would have a lot of value as a road sign or backlink. Less valuable would be a backlink from a directory of businesses that is operated in some foreign country.
Local business websites are able to be ranked in organic listings usually requiring a combination of website optimization techniques for Local SEO along with a backlinking strategy that is both realistic and strategic.
Local SEO Search Facts
- 87% of smartphone owners use a search engine at least once a day.
- 60% of American adults use smartphones and tablets to search for local product and service information.
- For e-commerce keyword searches, 83% of the time the top search result is mobile-friendly, and 81% of the time, the top three results are mobile-friendly
- Google search interest in “near me” has increased 34X since 2011 and has nearly doubled since last year.
- 51% of smartphone users look for local information while on the go.
- 50% of local-mobile searchers are looking for business information like a local address.
- 78% of local-mobile searches result in offline purchases.
As mentioned previously, backlinks are like road signs that direct visitors from other websites to your site, Google also follows or “crawls” these websites and uses these road signs as one measure of how popular and relevant the destination website happens to be.
A local SEO specialist’s job is to first optimize a clients website to make it as “search friendly” as possible for Google. As mentioned before Google has a number of items that they consider when ranking a website. Some of those items are outside of our control, but many are details that an experienced SEO can adjust to make them as easy for Google to search as possible. This is defined as on-page optimization.
The second area of focus is what is called off-page optimization. Off-page is obviously everything not directly on the website. This includes things like your Google properties like GMB page, Google Maps, Youtube channel. Another element that is important is citations, this is a businesses identification. Citations might be directory listings such as YellowPages, Yelp or BetterBusinessBureau, this is going to include a business’s Name, Address and Phone or what we call a NAP. It is important that this NAP is consistent throughout all citations. Good quality citations that are relevant to a particular business are always a positive resource. Citations will often also include the business’s website URL which also makes it a backlink as well.
The third area that SEO’s are involved with which is also considered an off-page element and the one that gets the most notoriety is backlinks and the process of developing backlinks. When developing backlinks you don’t want to buy backlinks but you may have to pay to develop quality backlinks.
Buying backlinks typically involves paying for a package of links pointing to your website that are usually placed on what are considered “spammy” sites. These are typically generic directories either here in the US but often are foreign based along with blog posts that are built only for backlinking and have to real purpose or connection.
Effective local SEO backlinking involves developing a realistic backlink profile. This involves generating quality content that is generated out from the website either as a blog post, infographic, video or some other piece of content. Next we seek quality sites to link to that content either by reposting that piece of content or sharing in some other way.
Another positive way to have these links distributed is to develop and maintain a syndication network that uses a variety of social media and web 2.0 properties to repost this content to. By doing this we are not producing several pieces of content, but making sure that the few pieces we might generate are circulated through several web properties.
There are a number of other steps that can be involved with SEO activities with any given website such as website crawl and analysis, Google analytics and implementing more advanced backlinking strategies. However these three items will provide an understanding of the primary steps involved in providing search engine optimization services for a website.
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