Are your SEO campaigns not working the way you want it? It’s time to think about local SEO.

Local SEO can be a low hanging fruit and you can easily pickup good rankings using local SEO when your national SEO campaign is not working.

There are millions of reasons why SEO doesn’t work sometimes. Following are the most important ones.

  1. SEO is expensive: SEO is a marketing race without any finishing line. If you have a new website or a blog, it is difficult to rank high within few months.
  2. SEO is complicated: When doing SEO, you need to work with different factors like optimizing your website as per search engine guidelines, keyword research, back linking and continuous promotion with directories and forums etc.
  3. SEO is on lower priority: There are far many businesses than you can think who give lesser importance to SEO than other marketing methods.

So, if you think SEO is not working then what should I try? Well, I suggest try Local SEO. Following are the strong reasons why I recommend Local SEO.

  1. Local SEO is easier: Compared to other online marketing methods. Local SEO is much easier. You need to use certain geo targeted keywords and optimize your website with those local keywords.
  2. Lesser work on website optimization: Compared to technical or offsite SEO and online SEO, Local SEO requires lesser work when it comes to website optimization. You can update pages with your “location based information” like Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP). With the NAP consistent, you can attract good amount of targeted local traffic.
  3. Lesser Competition: Local SEO focuses on very specific location based long-tail keywords. Once you identified those keywords which your local community searches when looking for local businesses, you can be winner in lesser time and with much lesser efforts. Competition is narrowed down to only your local area.
  4. Lower Budget: Because you need to invest lesser time and energy when doing Local SEO, it is very obvious that a tiny budget can do wonder. You can get higher ROI when doing Local SEO compared to large nation wide SEO.

Before we jump into how Local SEO can be performed, let’s study some of the most interesting facts about Local SEO.

  1. Local Searches Lead 50% Of Mobile Visitors To Visit Stores Within One Day (Google research).
  2. More Than 60% Of Consumers Have Used Local Information In Ads (Google)
  3. 88% Of Consumers Trust Online Reviews As Much As Personal Recommendations. (Bright Local)
  4. Business Address/Location Is The Primary Piece Of Information Sought By Local Searchers. (comScore)
  5. 50% Of Mobile Users Prefer A Mobile Browser To A Mobile App. (Bright Local)

Since you’re now convinced that Local SEO is critical for your small business success online, I would like to share some of of the points from the Local SEO checklist which we had created for our clients:

  1. Use Google Keyword Planner Tool and find 10-20 location based keywords.
  2. Use location based keywords in page title, headings (H1-H3 tags), description and in the image tags (ALT).
  3. Use Keywords in the URLs. Make sure all your URLs are clean and uses Hashtags (for e.g. http://yourdentist.com/dentist-in-new-york)
  4. Create Google+ My Business Page
  5. Use Business Name, Phone and Address consistently on all the website pages (footer is the best place).
  6. Update your website with responsive web design themes.
  7. Create Google Webmaster tools and Google analytics account. Embed both of them to your website.
  8. Search on Google with your business name and see if you find any incomplete or duplicate business listing, remove them and update it with the latest business contact information.

I hope you enjoyed this article on Local SEO. If you do, please share your thoughts / feedback in the comment box below. If you have any more suggestions on how to improve this blog post, please share that too.