SEO stands for search engine optimization and it’s the process of improving your web pages to rank higher in search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. “Optimization” means improving, and the goal of SEO is to improve your ranking in search engines by increasing the number of visitors that come to your website from search engines. Local SEO is the process of increasing the ranking of your website from its national web location to all other corners of the globe, or “geo-localization”. As well as increasing the number of visitors from search engines by sending them to your website, local SEO focuses not only on increased traffic, but also on users locating your website by name. These users are referred to as Local Links. You can see the national ranking of your website in the right hand corner of the SERP (Rankings section). Even if your website doesn't rank for the query you're targeting, if it's nearby it will show up. Both SEO and local SEO follow similar rules and principles, but they both have their own unique aspects. Very simply, here are the basic rules of local SEO: Rule 1: Position your website particularly well in search engines Local SEO can be broken down into three components: Ranking: your website must have a reasonably high proportion of top rankings that include your city name or any nearby key words. These top rankings should be 8–10 times higher than your national web location's top ranking URLs (this number varies from Google throughout different time periods). To rank for local terms in the UK, for example, Bing is looking for URLs which rank in the top section of the SERPs for: "best" - "Toulouse" - "los angeles" - "district grocery store" URLs: your website must rank for your city name with all your city keywords in your URLs. Meta Tags: the meta description and H1 tags of your website should include all the words spoken by the people who call your unique area by name.
2. What is Local SEO?
Local SEO is the process of ranking your business on page one of Google for local search terms. Local SEO is important because people are searching for local businesses on Google, and it also helps you get found by local customers. To understand how you can determine how high your business ranks in Google for local search, we need to dive into what SEO is, how it works, and what we can do to optimize our website for those searches. Recognizing that local marketing can best be done through local search, search engines such as Google and Yahoo! uses data from your webpages to determine the local context around your search terms, and rank your site for local searches. This is called a web page's domain. As a result, it can potentially get some of the first results a customer is seeing when they type a keyword into their web browser and searching for your business. Of course, the person at the other end needs to be interested enough in your specific product or service to investigate further, and if they find you, they may be even more interested in purchasing it or taking a lead on it. This can be helped, then, by creating high-quality pages for your business to ensure your customer can find you quickly and in the right context. In order to do that, you need to consider all of the SEO requirements the search engines require, and make sure all of your content is optimized for optimizing that page’s SEO. A good local SEO strategy will follow all the best SEO practices to help your visitor find you, and may even use some of the exact things we've discussed for this article, such as: “Local SEO is all about the balance between quantity and quality, and targeting keywords that give your website a fighting chance.
3. The importance of SEO for e-commerce stores
For e-commerce stores, SEO has three main benefits. One, SEO can drive more people to your site, increasing the number of people who might buy your products or services. Two, SEO can increase your conversion rate, which means that the people who visit your site are more likely to buy your product or service. And third, it gives you a competitive advantage over your competitors, especially if you have products or services that are similar to popular items already being sold online. In this way, online shopping can be incredibly useful (see image 8.1), and local shops often benefit from SEO by being able to “pull keywords” from customer searches. As someone who runs a local business, you likely already have a pretty good understanding of the three main arguments for SEO, and how they work. However, we’ll go over several variations of each of them that aren’t always clear, and explain why you might need to be using one of them, or none at all. Let's go through each one in turn. Although this is probably the most popular benefit of SEO, being able to pull a keyword from your customer’s search intent is only part of the equation. The other part is engagement based on click-through rate (CTR), which refers to people clicking on content you’ve shared on social media and eventually taking certain actions to buy your products. Generally speaking, businesses with multiple similar products or services are going to struggle to convert visitors to customers with a low CTA, low clickthrough rate, and high bounce rate, which is great news if you have a local business, then this is the reason to compete with companies with physical retail locations, rather than online only ones. As such, this metric is often used to judge the strategies, such as the Page Speed Optimization (SEO) strategy discussed later. Although some things can be easily measured such as page speed, this is usually things you can check on a per domain basis.
4. The importance of local SEO for local businesses Conclusion: SEO and local SEO are both important for e-commerce store owners and businesses with physical locations, but they serve different purposes. Without either strategy, however, you can't expect to succeed in your business endeavors.
Local SEO is about ranking as high as possible for keywords and phrases that are relevant to your services and products. With local SEO, you’re trying to attract local customers who are looking for your products and services in their area. SEO is a broad term, but is most accurately reported in the context of on-page ranking factors moving up to the #1 position. Local SEO, on the other hand, is reports effort and resource ranking move from the bottom of page one to the #1 position. Local businesses and websites are the most vulnerable in this ecosystem, with the exception of SERP dominance by brick-and-mortar businesses with integrated fulfillment. Differences between SEO & Local SEO SEO vs. Local Search Ranking What could possibly be more straightforward than "X% of these queries appear on Y% of these pages"? There's one big difference in the ranking methodology providers of major sites in local and traditional search, though. Traditional search uses a singular page for a search query, with all Google results presented on that page. Typically, this means search engines are particularly focused on widgets. When a user can search for something locally, the SERP becomes a single page that provides basic information. Online local search ranking methodology moves away from the single page model. In contrast to traditional search, when a user searches for something in a location specific area, many results are clustered together on a single page, often requiring multiple clicks to export additional results or answer additional questions. Instead, with local search results, users are mostly seeking multiple results. SEO is a requirement for any local business to be seen by Google and succeed in that SERP. This is true no matter the size of the business. Smaller businesses simply aren't requiring the same level of optimization effort as national retail and business models. On a national search result page, customers don't have to click more than one organic result to find a local result.
Conclusion: SEO and local SEO are both important for e-commerce store owners and businesses with physical locations, but they serve different purposes. Without either strategy, however, you can't expect to succeed in your business endeavors.
SEO and local SEO are both important for e-commerce store owners and businesses with physical locations. Without either strategy, however, you can’t expect to succeed in your business endeavors. As I mentioned in the beginning, SEO and local SEO can bring in a lot of traffic, but it’s the quality of that traffic that matters. In our analysis of 10 popular grocery stores across the US, we discovered the following statistics: 60% of organic traffic goes to Google Local Local SEO represents ~85% of every local search you do SEO is bringing you in 20-50% more equity than your non-local competitors each week Despite these indisputable statistics, a local business owner doesn’t have to guess about what works or what to do. With the right strategies, local SEO and local search marketing, as they're called, can bring in more traffic than your non-local competitors. Looking for a primer on how local search works, and what stores actually rank for queries pertaining to your store and region? Check out this interactive infographic on Moz. Types of local SEO There are three main instances of local SEO: organic, local pack, and pack results. Organic SEO refers to the effort that goes into ranking for local commercial search queries, while local SEO (aka the local business indicator) refers to inbound marketing efforts aimed at building up local neighborhood listings for websites, flyers, and storefront signage. Pack results are the organic results that likely show up top of the SERP in search results ordered by proximity. You now have four options for ranking locally in the eyes of Google. Local pack Local businesses are an essential part of every US community, which is one of the major reasons why Google created an organic search result for local businesses. These businesses largely serve the public for small purchases, usually consisting of a single goods or service. In Google’s eyes, local businesses are those that uphold the perceived community standards set forth by Google, such as operating safely and ethically, providing employment, and contributing to the local economy.
