If you’re running a business in the 21st century, one of your priorities must be to increase online visibility and presence. After all, modern businesses do a lot of their branding online through their websites and social media handles. One way these businesses improve their online presence is with the help of search engine optimization (SEO). 

Through proper keyword research and with the right support from digital marketing experts, it’s easy to optimize your site and content for the internet. However, if you’re a business that operates locally within a specific geographical region or runs operations that cater mostly to people from said region, you have to work on local SEO.

What is Local SEO?

SEO is a broad term. When you work with SEO companies or seek SEO services, you’re most likely to do SEO for your website and content on a wide scale. This scale could be countrywide or even global. 

The main purpose of such an SEO strategy is to gain more traction on your site. When done on such a wide scale, you’re basically targeting a much larger audience which, without a doubt, will need more work to be effective. 

For a more limited audience and region, there’s another approach called local SEO. 

Local SEO optimizes a website for it to appear more prominently in the search results from a specific geographical region. This could be a town, city, or state at max. This type of digital marketing strategy is subtle and compact and requires less work than a large-scale SEO strategy. 

Why We Need Local SEO

There are many businesses that do not need to reach a global or national audience. For such businesses, optimizing content for a large audience makes no sense. Thus, it’s more logical if you optimize the content to suit your local target group. 

Local SEO can be somewhat more efficient compared to your usual SEO. For instance, let’s say you run a local t-shirt shop in Boston. Now, if you were to do SEO normally, you’d optimize the content for keywords like ‘fashion,’ ‘t-shirt,’ ‘printed t-shirts,’ etc. These keywords have a lot of competition, which is why it will be difficult to rank them.

However, you can work with a top Boston SEO agency that specializes in local SEO to avoid dealing with the heavy national and global competition for a similar type of business. 

Since the agency is also in Boston, it, too, will know how to locally optimize your site. This agency will optimize the content for keywords like ‘Boston t-shirts,’ ‘best Boston t-shirt stores,’ ‘Boston designed t-shirts,’ etc. In doing so, they will have optimized the content for a more local audience who are likely to search for t-shirts available locally in Boston. 

How Does Local SEO Work?

In local SEO, there are a few different strategies involved that work in conjunction to feed the target audience certain types of search results. For that, you have to use location-specific keywords. The products or services you sell should also be locally available to your target audience. After all, that is the ultimate goal here – to sell these services and products locally. 

Apart from the location-based keywords, you should also look into using Google Maps. When you create a profile for your business on Google Maps, people will also get the geolocation of your business when they search for it on Google. 

The reviews on Google Maps for your business will also be visible to the users. Therefore, it’s imperative that you do your best to maintain a decent overall review on Google. 

What are the Benefits of Local SEO?

There are several benefits of local SEO. Some of the more important ones are pointed out below. 

• More response from the local audience.
• More concrete leads.
• Better chances of turning leads into sales.
• Less competition when ranking for different keywords. 
• More freedom to optimize your content in various ways without too much competition.
• Better chances of gaining leads through Google Maps and Google Business.

Challenges of Local SEO

While local SEO is an efficient way to optimize your content and website, it does come with a few challenges. We point out the important ones below.

• Your brand value will stay contained within a specific region or location.
• It will be a challenge if you, at some point, want to expand your business nationally or globally.
• Competition for keywords will remain the same if there are too many similar types of businesses in your area.

As you can tell by now, local SEO is a great way to optimize your business content and website for the internet. It works wonders in helping you gain local traction. While the challenges are there, it’s still worth the shot, given the benefits you can reap through local SEO strategies.