Millions of small businesses compete for customer attention in the US markets, regardless of industry and location. For most businesses, local outreach and sales matter the most because they rely on nearby customers for their revenues.

When you run a small retail store in Atlanta, you don’t expect to target buyers in Los Angeles or New Jersey. Obviously, they won’t fly for hours or pay massive shipping costs to buy from your store.

The safest bet is to focus on the accessible and reachable client base in your geographical area. Local SEO can help you achieve the goal. Statistics show that 98% of consumers rely on the Internet to get information about local businesses. Being visible to them can help you drive traffic to your website and brick-and-mortar business.

Another survey shows that 37% of American businesses believe local SEO is challenging. While there are no shortcuts to optimizing your Google My Business listing, landing pages, and website, Artificial Intelligence can definitely help you achieve more with less.

Let us share a few helpful insights on leveraging AI to build a successful local SEO strategy.

Keyword Research and Content Creation

According to Google statistics, “near me” searches increase by a staggering 500% year on year. With this, more companies are looking for ways to maximize their local market shares. Choosing the right keywords is the key, and it boils down to research and analysis.

Consider the instance of businesses in Atlanta looking to optimize their websites and landing pages for location-specific keywords. The best option is to collaborate with a local SEO company in Atlanta that uses AI tools to nail the keyword game.

AI can help you find the ideal ones with minimal effort and time while improving the quality of the SEO pipeline. AI tools can also create optimized content, generate article structures, and provide topic ideas for addressing the search queries of the local audience.

According to Panorama Press, AI-based keyword research tools are more productive than the ones generated by other research tools. Google Keyword Planner is a popular tool that relies on AI to power its search and provide effective keywords for local SEO campaigns.

List of useful tools:

• Moz Keyword Explorer
• Ahrefs
• Semrush
• Copy.ai
• ChatGPT
• Jasper.ai
• Google Bard

Automation of Repetitive Processes

Local SEO is cumbersome because it involves several repetitive processes, from site audits to managing business listings, keyword analysis, result tracking, and reporting. Addressing all these steps manually requires loads of effort and time. It means your team may end up doing the same unproductive tasks more often than you imagine.

AI can help automate these processes, leaving marketers with enough time to focus on critical tasks. You can start by using an AI tool such as ChatGPT to create scalable content for your multiple location pages. Imagine how much time and money you can save by letting a tool do the heavy lifting. Your content writers can prioritize content for value-adding areas instead.

Writing Google Business Profile descriptions, creating a robot.txt, responding to reviews, and generating local Schema markups are a few more areas of local SEO you can cover with AI. Providing customer support with smart chatbots is another actionable instance of using AI to supercharge your local SEO. That’s a lot of repetitive work eliminated from your local SEO plan, thanks to the strategic use of AI.

List of tools:

• Surfer SEO
• Alli AI
• RankIQ
• Diib
• Frase
• NeuronWriter
• Outranking

Deep Backlink Analysis

Studies show that link-building rates 7.8/10 when it comes to organic search rankings. Additionally, 94% of SEO professionals feel backlinks will continue to be a significant element of search algorithms in the next five years. Local backlinks are vital as they drive specific and targeted local search engine traffic to your website.

Powerful as backlinks are, building and managing a growing number of them can be taxing for a small business marketing team. You may feel frustrated as your profile accumulates low-quality backlinks over the years. AI can help you drive an effective backlinks analysis process and select the ones that add real value to your marketing pipeline.

Tools such as LinkMiner and Majestic SEO can help you evaluate backlinks and decide on the relative importance of any backlink. You can even find the ones that may help drive traffic and product conversions for your business. Once you get these insights, you can use them to fine-tune your local link-building strategy moving forward.

List of tools:

• Google Search Console
• SEO SpyGlass
• Seobility
• OpenLinkProfiler
• SE Ranking Backlink Checker
• BuzzSumo
• Ubersuggest

Summing Up

AI tools can help you improve your local SEO strategy for effective results within the shortest time. Fortunately, you can experiment with plenty of tools covering your needs, from keyword analysis to content creation, process automation, and backlink research and analysis.

All you have to do is pick the apt ones and create a portfolio to elevate your local SEO results.