Your customers are looking for you in their area

Put yourselves in your customers shoes. They are looking for your services, because you’re a plumber down the road, or a boiler repair team in the next town, how do these businesses show up in local online search results? Let alone how they appear there – does it matter? Well, what if your customers like to meet or have to meet face to face, depending on your business? Recently one of our clients found us purely based on location and after an initial meet, decided to take us up on our services.

Local Search is on the up

If you’re just starting out or already have an existing small business, then local SEO may be vital to you. There’s a trend here; local SEO is a result of the speeding up of society, where people want and demand an answer right now.

With emerging voice technologies that allow you to ask smart devices immediately, such as Google Home, Alexa or Cortana there is a noticeable spike in searches made via voice control; in fact 56% of people have used their smartphone to make a local voice search. Imagine all the potential traffic you could be missing out on, without Local SEO applied to your business?

Local SEO is going to be big. VERY BIG.

Local search is going to be big – HUGE in fact and that’s only going by searches made on mobile devices. Customers using local search are more likely to buy, they want the answers to their searches quickly and they’ve got the cash ready to purchase. There’s lots of different strategies to draw your customers in like tweaking your prices and ads to entice them to contact. 

Tackling the SEO competitors around you

It’s obvious that the higher your site ranks in search engines, the more traffic you should get directed to your website. The impact of dropping your rankings to page 2 from page 1 of Google search rankings can be devastating and reduce your traffic by up to 90%. 

Local SEO is the way to go because it’s easier to improve your rankings than the traditional organic SEO.

As Local SEO is influenced by voice search, such things as long tail keywords are easier to rank high for as oppose to traditional keywords like Web Design Sutton.

One way of optimising long tail keywords is by incorporating them into you blog posts. Can you see if we’ve done any here? 🙂 Another way is to get your customers to do it for you – by product or service reviews. 

Google My Business (GMB) set up is also essential, you need to fill in the details and keep these consistent if you’re also registering your business on a local directory, make sure to keep things consistent e.g. if your business is on Love Street, input it as Love Street everywhere – and not Love St. Once you’ve registered your details and your services on GMB, you can also publish your GMB website and use this to link back to as well as your website when doing backlinks.

Local SEO is here to stay and it’s only going to grow and grow, pushing us to keep up with the trends to keep on top of local search results for our local customers.