What is Local SEO?
Local SEO solutions are an effective strategy used for optimizing your business website so that it becomes more visible in the local search result on Google. A business having a physical location serving a particular geographical area can increase its business with the help of local SEO. For example, you have a local business such as a restaurant, grocery store, or agency. Now you want that customers in your area looking for similar products and services should find your business website easily on google search. So, this is where local SEO comes to your rescue. It will help you rank your website better in the search engine when a customer searches for some queries.
Having an online presence is really necessary for your business. It lets you target a local audience in your locality even if there is less footfall in your office building. While doing so you are optimizing your online presence for certain areas which is one of the best marketing steps currently.
How Does Google Work?
Google has made our life so easy but do you know how it works? Whenever you search any keyword on google, it runs a check on various websites and their ranking. It will check the relevance of the sites and present you with a list of websites that will be related to the keyword you typed. Whenever you type something on the search bar Google starts searching the Google index which has all the stored copies of all the websites. So, Google doesn’t do a live search every time you search your query.
How is Google Index formed? Google uses small programs that are called ‘spiders’ to crawl the web. Every spider has the same job to do. They start with a page, look at the content, follow all the links, move on to the next page, and the process keeps going on. The process is called crawling and the information is stored in Google’s servers, and the index is built. The spiders work at a very fast pace and crawl trillions of pages at an incredible speed. This process makes sure that the Google index is up-to-date and new websites are discovered quickly.
How Google Ranks Search Results?
You must be thinking how complicated all of it seems? It all seems so easy from above but do you know how Google ranks search results? It’s not that complicated and let me explain it to you in a very easy manner. Google is known to have different processes that are used to rank hundreds or thousands of sites in seconds of time. These processes are known as algorithms. So, whenever you search your queries on google, the algorithm searches the index and presents you with a list of websites with organic results. These organic results are chosen and ranked based on how relevant and prominent they are by checking inbound and outbound links.
The algorithm sees various factors both on-site and off-site to check the relevance of your search query. First, it finds all the sites that are related to your search and adds them to the list. Then it ranks those results according to prominence. All of the relevant sites are added to the list, which is then ranked by prominence. Those sites that answer your search query best will be listed at the top of the search results.
So how can you make your website look relevant and prominent so that it appears in the google search result? Having a good SEO influences both relevancy, prominence, and link popularity factors for your website. If you are able to focus on the right elements in your sites by adding keywords and links, your site will show up higher in the search results.
How Is Local SEO a Different Strategy?
What is Local SEO? Why is there a need for Local SEO? How did Google come up with this idea? So Google analyzed the trillions of searches made by the users to check the user behavior. Google found out that most of the people were searching for services in their local area. That is when they came up with an idea for Google’s local search algorithm. It includes a proximity factor, that Google considers your location into account when you search for a local keyword. It is not necessary to search by adding your ‘city name’ or typing ‘near me’ in the search. So whenever you are searching for something it will always show you results according to your location.
Let us learn it from an example. You have just returned home from the office and you want to order dinner for yourself. So you Google let us say ‘North Indian Food Delivery’. Now Google will show you nearby north Indian restaurants that offer home delivery. Now, the next day you went to the office and forgot your lunch at home. So, you decided to order lunch from the office itself. Now if you search with the same keyword you might not find the same restaurant in the list, because you are at a different location now. Depending on your location it will show you nearby places, which makes sense too as you want your food to be delivered as fast as possible.
Local SEO has been around for a long time but its use was very limited as people only used the internet on their computers or laptop. Nowadays, the popularity of smartphones has increased and almost every user is connected through the internet. As the users have increased so have the search queries, and the local SEO has become really important for any kind of business.
Conclusion
To have a good Local SEO it is very important to consider the local link popularity factors. We would advise you to build different landing pages for your businesses if they are located at different locations. Your landing pages should include your business name and other details like address and contact numbers. Use the best SEO practices by optimizing the title tags, and meta descriptions, and including the correct keywords in them. This should be included in your best marketing strategy as it helps to grow your customer base. We at Puminati Digital are very sure that after reading this article you are now aware of What is Local SEO? To know more about SEO best practices and other digital marketing blogs head over to our blog section.