Local SEO is important for any business. It does not matter if the business has a physical location or if it is online. It makes the difference between someone purchasing from you or purchasing from a competitor in another city, state, or even in another country.
So… why is Local SEO important?
Why Is Local SEO Important?
You want people to visit your store or your website, and you want them to purchase a product or service, right? Well, you have to have tell people where you are and what you offer.
Sure, just putting up a store and a website will be great, but you need to let the world or your surrounding community know. Of course, there are newspaper advertisements, billboards, radio ads, and phone book listings that you could invest in. You could invest in premium web listings or even premium ads with search engines. However, you still need to build your foundation with your website to be organically listed in keywords that people will locally search.
General keywords are hard to get top rank, and really are not ideal for local business. For example, how often would someone from Nigeria come to your store in Texas for some barbecue rub. The answer: That might seem like less than “once in a blue moon.”
Instead, think logically about optimizing your site. For example, if your store that sells barbecue rub is in San Antonio, Texas, then you might want to optimize your website around keywords like:
- San Antonio barbecue rub
- barbecue rub store in San Antonio
- San Antonio barbecue rub store
- San Antonio Texas barbecue rub
- Texas barbecue rub
You could also go further and optimize using keywords for different flavored rubs.
You could optimize for the general keywords ‘barbecue rub’, but you will be competing with other places around the world that do sell a similar product, even if the flavors offered are different than your business. I am not discouraging you from doing this, especially since you might actually sell from your website. However, you need to think about your local store and endearing your surrounding community to your product.
In cities like San Antonio, which according to a United States Census Bureau survey in 2011 that was listed in Wikipedia, it is the 7th largest city in the U.S. This means there could be dozens of stores that sell products that are similar to your business. You need to somehow be the business that people see first. These are your immediate potential customers. They are not just going to aimlessly drive around the city to find you. They might not have the patience to go through the phone book, or even care to buy a newspaper. They might not even listen to the radio stations you might use for your advertising.
The Internet has become a fast means of obtaining any type of information. If your store is listed and there is a map, you might have a chance of being seen. However, and I emphasize this… if you are not listed on that front page of that keyword that the consumer is searching for, then you just gave business to your competition.
Are you a local business? Take a look at your site right now and ask yourself if you are properly optimizing your site for Local SEO.
I have actually transitioned into Local SEO versus national in recent months as well. The fact of the matter is, even though the traffic is less, its more targeted. And its 100 times easier to get ranked if you know what your doing.
Yes, I agree with you Clint that local SEO does just as well if not better than national SEO and the leads are so much easier to convert.
Local SEO has significant importance , It helps to get more exposure from targeted geographical area. and target the specific traffic to the website.
Hello Nile
Ya local SEO is the thing which most people neglected.But this is significant important. Thanks for these nice tips about local SEO. These tips really help me and other bloggers like me.
Hey Nile,
Nice post and Thanks for sharing this post with us. Yes, local SEO really helps in driving traffic as it helps to promote our blog. This post surely gonna help all the newbies.
Nile,
Glad you pointed this out to people and you gave great examples of applicable keywords that people can understand and relate to as an example!
One of the best examples of businesses for whom Local SEO is critical is Restaurants. Nobody outside the local area is looking for it. Even if you are in New York and looking for a Latin Restaurant in West Palm Beach, Florida, you will type in the city or zip code or whatever. People will always search Local for restaurants. Getting to the top of the Google heap nationally for Latin Restaurants will probably have zero impact on your business (in this case, a restaurant). If you don’t ship it, then Local SEO is the way to go!
Thanks for the article!
~ Jupiter Jim
Hi NIle,
You make it simple and easy to understand.. I have to go at this more from a local perceptive.. I do what I do and that will make it better–locally! Off to optimize my site for more local SEO! Thanks!
Nile, I believe local seo is primarily important for those companies and local restaurants that focus on local customers. However, businesses focusing on international audience can completely ignore this. Correct?
No… you should also focus on local SEO. For example, if you are a freelance web designer… make sure to be optimized for being listed on top in your area.
The role of SEO in every blogger\’s lyf is of gr8 importance, arnd which we all are bounded.Since all bloggers want to have huge so to do that what we want, is to make our site visible in search engines.Really vry informative post…keep sharing!!!
Every business needs to think local – even if you have a national audience. Why give up business in your own back yard to a competitor when all you had to do was optimize for your local as well as national audience? Especially relevant as search gets more and more personalized.
Its true that local SEO help to promote your business from home. If you will start getting traffic and visitors on your business locally, It help you to get customer internationally. We can’t ignore the value of Local SEO in business.
I would have to agree with you like everyone else. Local SEO can bring you amazing targeted traffic. It can be tricky when it comes to blogs that have nothing to do with a local region but can be very beneficial and very easy to rank.
Hi Nile,
Thanks for a great article on local SEO. I am launching my health business and building my website. Since this is local, regional, national and international, it is important that I focus SEO locally as well as globally. Yoast has a local SEO paid plug-in – have you seen this? I would be interested in knowing whether it is worthwhile. I love his SEO plug-in. It would be crazy if my business didn’t rank locally and local folks did not find me when seeking a natural health clinic so I will be following your advice closely. I will let you know how it goes. l live in a town of 30,000 so while it is a small market, it is very targeted.
Thanks again
Clare
Good post Nile. Its easy to rank with local seo but we can’t get huge traffic if we target some specific cities.
Hi Nile! Thanks for the quality post. Its so much helpful. Local SEO is comparatively easy rather than other parts. My suggestion is that if anyone wants to start a career in SEO, local SEO will be the best option.
You have rightly pointed out the importance of local SEO…… But this way it will also get specified for certain region which eventually have negative impact if looking for greater traffic…………
This was such a great article – thank you. As a new blogger, I sometimes feel like everyone is already at the next level so it was good to get some advice for
yeah local seo is cool
there are a lot of money to be made
local seo is next thing i want to do
thanks for remind me of it
So how would one optimize SEO on a business that does not have a physical location, only and online store? Would local SEO be helpful in this case or not?
You could still optimize for… say example DIY stuff like homemade candles or jewelry. Aside from the other few terms, you would add: Sioux City Homemade Jewelry …or whatever term you need. You would also want to have blog entries to build up those terms.
For example, for web design, I would probably want to try to start optimizing more on St. Louis Web Design.
These days people don`t want to go to any store they want their desired things at their door step.So if you are running a online store it does not matter either it is out of city or country ???
Hi Tayyab! You still want to have a local location optimized for. Like within the US, business owners still have to pay their local, state, and federal taxes… so it would be important to try to include your local community. For example, I do and sometimes I participate in some of the local events under my business name.
I want to be optimized strongly in my surrounding area as this makes my business foundation stronger. These days I go to conferences and I don’t have to introduce myself because people already know me well enough because of the legwork I have done throughout the years to be listed well, both locally, AND globally.
I try to tell people that local SEO is way better and more efficient than national SEO. Especially if your business is localized.
Interesting news . It would be great if you can provide more details about it. Thanks you
If you are small business owner or your business only targeted for specific location user than local SEO for your website is really important and this local searches mainly come from mobile and tablet devices so be sure your website is properly optimize for all this devices.
Nice info nile
local SEO is important to get a lot visitor
thanks
Using local search engines & online directories promotes your business to local customers at exactly the point that they’re looking for your business. There’s no better time to connect with a potential customer then when they really need you.
I agree that local seo is very important! I work hard on SEO and out of my 30,000 visitors per month, 23,000 of the come from Dubai!
Great info, keep it up! Thanks! Be back soon 🙂
hello Nile local SEO help ful for those who have small business and if you have big network then you should not use it. i have yoast SEO and i love it.
thanks 🙂
Hi Nile Awesome post..SEO is very important for context of every blogger,either it is local or global..for SEO you have to choose unique and good points which a layman search..Thanx for share
Yes I agree, why would you waste money and effort for general SEO when it is not necessary unless your company offer delivery or have other branches in other parts of the world.
I agree with your idea. I will build a company and to apply SEO in there.
your right
local seo can help to improve your site rank on alexa too
I can’t help but agree to this post. Local SEO is indeed very important as it will initially make the website visible in the search engine result page, yes, initially.
Hi Nile,
It’s really great to know about Why Is Local SEO Important. Now a days SEO is facing lot of changes with Google panda and penguin update & some people think now SEO is dead but still there is value & need of SEO.
I am happy to come across your suggestion for local SEO. It is an important process to get local traffic as well reputation of your business.
Yea i agree with you nile! Local seo is important,but most of them are neglecting local seo,you had provided some interesting notes on local seo and how important are they.Thanks for sharing this ! I was unaware of this!
Hi Nile. I’m really glad that I ran across this post. It wasn’t something I had thought about. I recently joined the Chamber of Commerce in a nearby town (the one in my town kind of sucks), and I want to do some local advertising for my work at home business. I just got the pro version of SEO All-In-One, and I need to start putting in the information. So this is very timely for me. Thanks so much for all your great information.
All the best,
Leslie
SEO is very important for ranking our site ahead of our competitors in Search Engine. And also it is much more important to rank our site locally with our competitors than to think of global competitors. And for the small business, it enough to stand ahead of local competitors to gain a profit in it. To all this happen, we should focus on Local SEO than globally which will be little difficult.
Please provide a detailed article on local SEO techniques. I just know a few of them like local directories listing like yellow pages, contact information (address, phone number) on the homepage and language tag in the source of the blog. But these aren’t enough for me, I want more to perform local SEO in a right way. Please help.
I see a lot of businesses do that. Guess it’s really effective.
SEO is needed for organic traffic
and NAP is still needed for local traffic
if we can dominate both why not?
You make it simple and easy to understand.. I have to go at this more from a local perceptive.thanku for sharing with us
I was not bothered about local SEO, but after reading this article I need to keep this thing in my mind, nice article, thanks for sharing.
I think geographical location forces us to focus more on local seo, specially for small business which has no branches or only few branches.
hello nile
accordingg to me i think , local SEO really helps in driving traffic as it helps to promote our blog. i will share it with some new bloggers so that they can know the importance of local seo
Seo is important for free organic traffic. more traffic the more revenue fore your business/ blog.
Great points Nile!
I agree with Clint’s take as well. Most small business owners really aren’t trying and are too
concerned with trying to rank locally.
Who knows why, but one reason I suspect is because their designer is more concerned with trying to rank nationally. And like Clint and Sarah also pointed out, those leads are a whole lot easier to convert, because they really are for the most part, searching with a purpose.
Thanks for sharing some excellent, well thought out points.
Hey Nile, yes, very important, just trying to get my feet into local SEO for a small business I want to help out!
Nile,
Great effort by Nile seen in this blogs a lot of don’t know about local SEO and how to bring bussiness. This blog will really help how to do local SEO and be on first page of Search Engine
Nile, I have found your article is amazing for Local SEO point. This blogs will really help for guys who want to learn Local SEO