Ok, you have an offline business that could use local SEO and a lot more visitors to your website. What you need to do is have your website optimized for local search traffic from Google and other search engines. It can be very powerful depending on your offline business, and lots of brick and mortars do very well with it. The remainder of this article offers you three proven local SEO principles that you can use with confidence.
When it comes to local SEO, the most effective tip you can get is to put yourself in your customer’s place and start thinking like them. If you want to understand how your customers approach online searching then you need to be able to look into their mind. In other words, try to analyze what would your customer/searcher enter in the search box to find your site and buy your products? Let’s say that you are running a furniture store where you sell all types of furniture such as tables, chairs, beds, etc. But you specialize in office furniture, so if the searcher puts in “table” in the search box, will they be able to reach you? Will that be a good match? Most definitely not. However, if they put in something like “computer table for office”, now that would be a good match. Don’t make the mistake of getting caught up with broad keywords that are popular, which can bring in lots of traffic but won’t convert well. Instead go for keywords that are less popular but are more targeted and have a higher probability of getting you a customer.
Your content should be geared towards the area you are aiming to rank for. This helps you gain search engine’s attention and also of the users in that particular area. Therefore, if your goal is to rank for a certain area, you need to create content that is important to the people there and that is relevant to the area. You will have to create content that is related to them in multiple ways. If you want to establish a connection with your local audience, then thinking outside the box will prove useful and ensuring the content is connected to what they are interested in.
Having your site hosted on a server located in the area you are trying to rank for in the search engines is a great idea. You will gain more SEO points because the search engines will relate the location of the server to your site. Since it can have a fair bit of impact, it is best to check the location of the server where you are considering hosting your site.
Overall, this article shows that local SEO is critical if you want to drive localized and high converting traffic. This type of local SEO has multiple benefits one of which being that you don’t have to compete against sites from all over the world which makes ranking easier.