Local SEO Tools – Help Local Shoppers Find Your Business
Does your business need a boost? If so, you might not know where to start. We recommend starting close to home, with local SEO. These tools can add value to your business by growing your revenue.
Before you begin implementing any new tools, it’s important to understand the value those tools can offer your business.
The same is true for local SEO tools. These can enhance your business by leveraging your online presence–primarily, your website–to increase sales.
Why is local SEO important? SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, gets visitors to your website. On the local level, it does the same, plus more.
It gets people into your brick-and-mortar business.
The fact is that the internet is becoming more and more important to shoppers. 97% of consumers use the internet to shop locally. What is it they’re looking for?
- Convenient location
- Top ratings and reviews
- Products and services to meet their needs
These three attributes can inspire shoppers to visit your store or office, but they’re not enough.
Suppose that you sell hats. In this example, imagine there are ten haberdashers in your town. For hats, this might be a saturated market, but we’re just having some fun with an example.
You have better customer service than any other haberdasher. You make higher quality hats. Your shop is located right on Main Street.
The problem? No one knows it.
Now, if you get a website and make use of local SEO tools, you can see a rise in business because people know that your convenient haberdashery offers the best hats and the best service.
Local SEO can do the following for your website and business:
- Land you a high-ranking spot in SERPs
- Boost brand awareness
- Increase sales
Let’s dive a bit deeper to find out how these tools accomplish this.
Get a Higher Rank
Where you show up on SERPs, or search engine results pages, can determine how many searchers find your business on a search engine. The higher the ranking, the more likely you are to be found.
After all, when was the last time you searched through ten pages of results to find a type of business or store?
Take Google for example. On Google, there’s something called the local pack. If you search “haberdashers near me” (and there are in fact hat shops in your area), you will see a map with local results beneath it.
This local pack pulls from citations. Citation building is a local SEO tool, and it’s important. The local pack on Google shows in the number one ranked spot on SERPs for 93% of searches.
Boost Your Brand
Branding is so important to draw customers. Your brand is your business’ personality. It’s what creates a rapport with your customers.
So how do you build brand awareness? One way is through reviews.
If you have the right local SEO tools in place, you can manage your reputation and allow customers to tell others, through reviews, how much they love your business.
As an added bonus, search engines like Google tend to rank businesses that are well-reviewed higher than those that have fewer reviews or poor reviews.
We mentioned citations in the above section. They help with reviews, too. That’s because a citation is basically linking information to your business.
It can be your NAP, or name, address, or phone number. A citation can be a link to your business.
If your business has a citation on a high-ranking site, and customers leave favorable reviews on that site, then that’s local SEO working at its best to boost your brand.
Increase Sales with Local SEO Tools
At the end of the day, it’s your bottom line that matters most. If your business isn’t making money, then it’s not functioning as a business. How can local SEO tools help your business make money?
Local SEO is unique because it gets people into your office or store. It does this by the methods described above, and more.
With the right keywords and geolocators, you can tell search engines what your business does and where it does it.
This way, when someone searches for your haberdashery, the search engines know you have one, and where it is. They can return results that are convenient to the searcher.
SEO is all about the user experience. Local SEO is about bringing that experience home.
Years ago, searching for a hat shop may have involved sorting through results from near and far to find the right one.
Think of local SEO like being listed in the phone book. Before the internet and search engines, people opened their local phone book to find nearby businesses that could suit their needs.
If they needed a hat, they’d thumb through to the “H” section of the phone book to find “hat shop” or “haberdashery.” There they would see listings of all the local shops to suit that need.
The phone book basically provided citations. However, it didn’t provide anything else.
You can’t read reviews in a phone book. You can’t tell from a phone book that one shop is six miles away while another is twelve. You can’t get much of a sense of branding from a phone book, either.
Local SEO brings all those elements together, along with the citation, to provide the best possible user experience. As it turns out, what’s good for the user is good for the business that meets the user’s needs.
That is how these tools can help you build your business and grow your sales.
Learning how to implement local SEO can be a time-consuming process, so many businesses work with SEO experts who are trained in how to connect local businesses with local consumers.
Even better, experts can connect your business with the local consumers who are most likely to become customers or clients.
If you still have questions about the power local SEO can give your business, we invite you to contact us. We can’t wait to help you and your business reach–and exceed–its potential.
