You won’t see an increase in organic leads and phone calls through people finding you online. You’ll have to rely on old-school marketing tactical like word-of-mouth, which don’t scale. So while reviews don’t directly impact rankings, we believe that having more reviews will help your click-thru-rate which will improve rankings.
You can further optimize your GMB profile by sharing business updates and fresh content regularly. And Sprout Social makes that easier with a new feature to post directly to your GMB profile. Make the most of the Sprout GMB feature to update your customers with what’s new and share details about upcoming events. This helps you connect with your customers on a deeper level in addition to boosting your visibility in local searches. To understand the local SEO definition, let’s first try to understand what local search means. Local search is when someone searches for businesses, products, services or any additional information relevant to one specific location.
The insights gleaned create a baseline for what is required to outrank them. While Google is the #1 search engine globally, you can’t tell if a sizeable number of your customers use other search engines. Optimizing Marketing Automation on other search engines ensures you are everywhere your customer tries to find you. I’ll be lying to say the local SEO process isn’t overwhelming, especially for business owners new to SEO. As intimidating as these processes look, they’re your best chance of getting into the local snack pack and improving your local organic rankings.
I’m going to leave you with a checklist of the tasks you need to complete when optimizing your website for local search results. This means that even if you are struggling to get a high ranking for a particular URL on your site, you may still get visibility for your business via search results from other sites. A Statista 2019 survey found that more than 50% of online shoppers have used their mobile phones to research more about a product while in-store. The traffic for location-based businesses has increased from 19.2% to 28.8% between Jan 2020 and July 2021. If that’s not sufficient, an analysis of 500 location-based websites by the Milestone Research department further makes a compelling case for leveraging local SEO strategies. Local and organic searches together make up 69% of overall digital traffic.
Matthew from Sears Home Services shares his experiences and advice in this Q&A moderated by David. Imagine doing such a great job with your branding that you become a part of your customer’s life. This magic doesn’t happen by dictating the corporate voice from a head office, but from empowering your locations to build customer community. Master the knowledge you need to get a local business found online. Ahrefs also offers competitor analysis, keyword research, and insight into other websites’ anchor text when backlinking to your site.
If it isn’t easy for people to discover your business in search results, this could negatively impact your sales, your reputation, and your long-term success. Google Business Reviewsprovides more information on why reviews are beneficial and offers tips for getting more of them. You can move the map and use the ‘search this area’ function to explore different locations.
The signals you need to rank and expand your local visibility. The ranking techniques we present in our training program are based on years of testing. We’ve analyzed hundreds of campaigns, and we know what works. We’re also constantly testing our methods to ensure that they’re still effective and up-to-date. An annual limited-access master class designed for agencies seeking a fast-track to scale local marketing operations. Most of the SEO and marketing courses out there aren’t designed for local marketers.
With this factor in user behavior, Google now takes into consideration the user’s location when conducting a search. It does it automatically and you don’t need to add in extra words like your location or the words ‘near me’ or ‘nearby’. The organic results are further down, below the local snack pack results.