Hi, my name is Philip Stemann, and I will be learning you how to succeed with your website. This is the first episode in my local SEO miniseries where I’ll dive into how you can succeed with local SEO. This episode will contain some basics about local SEO and in the coming episodes, we’ll dive more into what you need to do in order to win the local SEO game and get the results you need. Let’s start by talking about who should focus on local SEO.
If you see that your target group is close to you or you have a store, you’re a mechanic, a flower store or just all stores in general, then you should focus on local SEO. Basically, you can just say it overall. If your client base is within your zone, you should focus on local SEO. In order to win the local rankings you need to optimise your website for it. And there are multiple ranking factors that I will go over in the coming episodes.
It can be a landing page where you focus on a specific local target. This focus will help you create leads, customers and in general just increase your traffic to your website and create awareness about your website and your store. This includes that you need to find local keywords. You need to maintain your Google My Business. Don’t worry these things I will go into more in the coming episodes, and then you need to focus on a lot more different ranking factors.
For instance, we want you to rank high on the map because the map plays a huge role, which I will also dive into later. Based on the study that Search Engine roundtable did, it showed that 46 percent of everyone who does a Google search, they have local intent. You see now how important it is that you focus on this, right? It’s almost half of all searches. Another study conducted by RankRanger showed that only 29 percent of the search results are local results.
This means that there is a huge, huge opportunity here for you to grab. Even Google themselves created a study where it showed that 76 percent of people who search for something local in their phone visited the store the same day. This is why it’s so important that you rank high when people search for something that’s relevant for your store, whether it’s flowers, you’re a mechanic or everything else, you need to rank high because let’s imagine that I want to go to a bakery.
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Then basically, maybe I’ll go in and I’ll search bakery and then my city. If you rank high and you have good reviews from your Google My business, I will most likely go to your store right away. Don’t get scared by all of this data. I know that it was a lot, but it’s just to tell you how important it is to focus on local SEO if your target group is close to you.
When you optimise for local SEO there are a number of factors that you need to be aware of. You need to be aware of the location that the person is searching from, NAP citations; this is name, address and phone number. This need to be visible for you. Then you need to optimise your presence of your Google My Business listing. I will make an entire episode just focussing on this. Then you need to focus on the keywords that you use in your Google My Business profile, in the description, in the title, and so much more. Then you need to focus on the sentiment of online reviews.
It’s so important that when you start getting customers that you ask them to conduct a review, make a review, and you Google my business, your Facebook page and so on, because all of these reviews create credibility, and they make you rank higher in the end, because the more reviews and the higher stars, the more I am likely to go visit your store. If you can get your customers to make check ins on the location where your store is, that’s another good benefit.
This you can do by easily. Let’s say that you give them a five percent discount if they make a check in at your store, it creates awareness around the customer’s friends and family and most likely they probably live around the same area. So they’re basically promoting your store for you. Furthermore, the more that your store is shared on social media, the better. And this is also part of the check in this is basically also a share of your store on the social media.
And the last thing is your Google Maps star rating for that business. This is back to the online reviews of your Google My Business. This is also shown on Google Maps. So let’s say that go back to the example that I want to find a bakery in my city and I’m on Google Maps. Well, basically, I will most likely choose the one with the best reviews because I trust other people, give the good reviews and the honest reviews.
So this was just a basic introduction episode. In the next episode, I’ll dig into the Map Pack and how you dominate the Google Maps. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, consistency is key to success. Let’s catch up on the next one.
