Picture a customer shopping around on Google for “best bakery near me”, “digital marketing agency in my city” or “salon near me”. Now picture your business not showing up on the first page of results. You may have a product or service that satisfies many, but if people can’t even find you, how will they purchase from you? It’s a serious conundrum for many small businesses today. Fortunately for you, there’s a solution that won’t cost you thousands in ads – local SEO.
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short, is the art of fine-tuning your online presence to appear more prominently in search engine results. Local SEO focuses on customers searching for a particular product or service in a certain geographical region. By implementing local SEO and telling Google what you do, where you do it and helping Google give you an easy-to-find result, you’ll be found by customers searching for what you do.Local SEO is all about ensuring that your website shows up more frequently when customers search for a specific service or product within a certain location. Traditional SEO, or general SEO, tends to put the focus more on what you do rather than where – whereas local SEO focuses on where you do what you do, and who you do it for (e.g. city, town, neighbourhood, specific area of service). So when someone Googles “best café in Kochi” that’s different to “how to start a café business.” the first is searching for someone to provide a service nearby, while the second is searching for information.
Local SEO is crucial because it all but guarantees that your potential customer searching for a service like yours nearby finds you – and it can be easier than you might think. Having a website online is a start, but if Google can’t decipher what you do, where you do it and who you do it for, it’s unlikely your website is going to show up prominently in local search results. It’s important to describe what you do (and where and who you do it for) in relevant pages on your website – don’t shoehorn keywords in, but make sure the content that describes the service you provide includes the location/s you provide it in.