If you’ve never heard the term ‘local SEO’ before, then you’re in the right place. Most people when thinking about marketing for their business don’t consider local SEO, for the simple fact that many people don’t know what it is.
For us, local SEO seems to be one of the most underutilised marketing opportunities around. So let us give you a quick overview of what local SEO is and why you should take advantage of it.
In basic terms, local SEO is optimising your Google Business Listing to appear in the three listings below the map on the front page, referred to as the maps pack.
The goal of this is to have another place where potential customers can see your business, and call, get directions, or click through to the website directly from the top of that front page. This additional avenue for enquiries, of course, leads to more booked jobs or products sold.
So how does Local SEO work?
In the same way a website can be optimised for multiple search terms, so can your Google Business Listing. So instead of only appearing in the search for ‘local SEO Gold Coast’, you could also appear in ‘local SEO services Gold Coast’ or ‘local SEO company Gold Coast’, depending on the types of things that people type in to search.
We determine the right keywords for your strategy in a couple of ways, but both involve data and keyword research. We’re able to see the types of things people naturally search when looking for services like yours – and sometimes it’s not what you’d expect! We can also take a look at the sorts of keywords that your competitors are targeting, and use that information to decide if we want to target them as well.
While we’ve talked a lot about keywords so far, it’s important not to develop tunnel vision in your strategy. There may be words that you think are the most important and have the most search volume – and you may be right. However, these keywords are also likely to have the most competition, meaning that they’ll take more work and time to rank.
This is why we also advise in addition to target relevant keywords with less search volume and less competition. These are still great terms that are somewhat easier to rank for and gain traction with & provide a more qualified client for your service or product.
What do we mean when we say ‘optimisation’ for local SEO?
The goal of optimisation is to help search engines identify what your business does and match your online presence to the things that people search for. Optimisation will also help you with marketing that will promote you as an authority by talking confidently about the topics that people are looking for. This helps you earn trust with your prospects – without them realising that they’re being marketed to.
It’s also important to make sure that you’re optimising for the right keywords – after all, there’s no point in showing at number one for something that doesn’t actually have anything to do with your business or your services. When you rank for the wrong keywords, you’re losing out on opportunities to gain qualified leads and make money.
That’s why when you start a local SEO campaign, it doesn’t matter how big or small your business is. One of our clients, a mortgage broker in Brisbane, outranks the four majors for a variety of keywords – because we’ve optimised the ones most relevant to him.
So if you want to start getting local traction for your business, contact the experienced team at Digital Surfer today.
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