It is possible to make your business appear in the top search results of your city, it is a Local SEO job. I will give you an example:
Imagine that you have a barbershop in the city of Tijuana. And a resident of that same city, Tijuana, searches in Google “barbershop” and your barbershop comes up. If he wants to get a haircut and finds yours, he is a customer you win. Unbelievable? Possible? Yes, and I’m going to explain what it is and how to do local SEO so you understand how to apply it to your business.
Do not lag behind because this is the new digital era and is increasingly present. There are already many users doing searches that expect a local response and over time they will increase, do not miss the opportunity to take advantage of it…
What is local SEO?
It is a series of good practices to rank a website for searches made in a certain geographic area.
It’s like if you have a car rental business in Yucatan, Mexico and, in that same city, you manage to rank for all searches that are made on “car rental”.
There you would be doing local SEO, because you are ranking in Google for all local searches on “car rental” that are made in Yucatan, Mexico.
Generally, you can apply this to any type of business where you sell something for your city, whether it is a physical store, you offer a service in an office or you don’t have an office; but you still provide services online to people in your city. Which makes it a great opportunity to rank for those searches related to your business. More traffic means more clients.
Benefits of local SEO
- Many people don’t know about SEO, therefore, if there is competition, it shouldn’t be a big problem to rank above them, as it is in most cases.
- You save on paying SEM advertising campaigns and the best thing is that this will be a source of organic visits, which if you do not know what it is, is to get traffic constantly every day of the year without paying for advertising.
As you may notice, this type of SEO is based on being in the first search results that are listed in your city. So, if you have a business and you manage to rank it, you will get the highest amount of traffic if you are in the first results.
The fact that people are doing the searches voluntarily, makes quality traffic. Ask yourself who would search for something without the intention of finding something that interests them even a little bit? No one, right? Whoever searches for a chocolate business, it’s because they have an interest in knowing about a chocolate business, just to give another example.
Many struggle to sell their services or products with traditional advertising and don’t take SEO seriously or don’t know about it.
How to do local SEO?
Now, to optimize our website to appear in searches for our locality, we can start with:
Opening a Google My Business listing. It is an account that you create in Google where you can set the details of your business, identifying the place and what you sell. Data that will be helpful to Google when showing results to users.
Include keywords. Add the keyword of both the service and the city where you are selling the product or service. This will help Google understand what your business is about and where your business is located when offering results to users.
Optimize images for ranking. Google also tends to show images, since users like to know what businesses look like. Therefore, it is common to see images in searches with local intent, so optimize images for ranking.
Place links to other pages in the area. Google will be able to link you to a specific area if you link to other websites that are in your area. Of course, if they have a presence in Google.
Google My Business
To rank locally you need help from Google My Business, therefore it is good to dedicate time and effort to it so that you can take advantage of all its benefits that will make you gain more customers (better position → more visits → more customers).
3 key parameters that the algorithm considers to rank you
Relevance. It measures how well your data matches the searches that users do on Google. Therefore, it is good to fill in all the Google My Business data related to what you sell or the service you provide.
Distance. Google calculates the distance your business has from the user. If a user searches for “pharmacy”, Google will show the closest one. Although it may vary depending on what your company sells, for example, if we are an SEO agency that provides SEO services, and someone, no matter where they are in Tijuana, searches for “SEO in Tijuana” our agency will appear. Because this is a service that can be provided from an office, which does not make it essential that you are nearby to need our services. On the other hand, as the pharmacy can only sell to you if you are in their premises, it is important how close you are for Google to know whether to recommend it or not.
Prominence. This calculates how well known a company is. Google takes into account information from the internet such as links, articles and directories. It also takes offline information taking as reference how well known the brand is to people. And finally, ratings and comments are also taken into account. Therefore, it is good to encourage customers to rate you, you can always choose to give them a discount or a gift to make them feel comfortable about doing you a favor.
Anyway, this is just a few things of what you should know about local SEO, but I would like to add one more thing that you may not be aware of and that is that SEO results are not immediate, they are medium and long term. This makes many people quit and fail to enjoy all the benefits that SEO can give them. And if there is competition, you just have to do it better. As long as you do a good job you can ensure a good ranking, the time will depend on other factors, such as the market, competition and search levels.
