How Important is SEO and How do I get it?
Tired of slim pickings in Venice, FL? Want to see more locals walking through your shop doors every day? Well Venice merchants, now is the time to start harnessing the incredible power of local SEO and watch your cash registers ring!
I see you nodding, but wondering – what exactly IS local SEO anyway? Glad you asked!
In a nutshell, local SEO helps Venice businesses like yours appear at the top of Google search results – but ONLY for potential customers searching locally in your town.
For example, when Venice resident Mike types “landscaping near me” into Google, a websites with GREAT local SEO pops up right before Mike’s eyes, enticing him to pick up the phone and call for an estimate. Now Mike’s house will have the snazziest curb appeal on the block, all thanks to the Venice landscaper’s awesome local SEO skills.
With local SEO, you only attract customers who are already looking for exactly what you offer in the Venice area. So you can focus your puny marketing dollars on reeling in the BIG Venice fish – converting qualified leads into sales.
Buying Intent
And get this – over 80% of people who search for a local service on Google have their credit cards handy and ready to spend with a Venice business like yours in the next few days. Cha-ching!
Local SEO is what separates the Venice winners from the losers. It’s what keeps the cash flowing all year long, especially when competing against big corporate chains.
This means that local SEO addresses the problem of relevancy. It ensures your business shows up when potential customers are searching for exactly the kinds of products or services you offer in your specific geographic location.
Plus, local SEO helps create far more visibility. Small businesses often struggle to compete with larger companies with bigger marketing budgets. Local SEO levels the playing field by helping small businesses appear in local search results, where potential customers are actively looking for products or services in their area.
Okay, so now you have a better understanding of search optimization and how it applies to a local business like your own. Now you probably have more questions, with some of them revolving around what type of work will be done, what type of plan to ask for/look for, how you’ll know the SEO is working, and just general curiosity.
An SEO agency can help your local business in several key ways:
- Improve your website’s rankings in search engine results.The agency will thoroughly analyze your website and implement comprehensive on-page and off-page SEO optimizations to help boost your rankings for relevant local keywords. This can drive more organic traffic to your site from local customers searching on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.
- Optimize your website specifically for local search visibility.The agency will implement important things like:
- Adding your accurate business name, address, phone number and other key details to your website’s schema markup. This helps search engines clearly identify the nature and location of your business.
- Creating and optimizing Google My Business and Bing Places for Business listings. These free profiles act as mini websites for your business within the search engines. Optimizing them thoroughly is vital for local SEO success.
- Optimizing your site’s pages with location-specific keywords, ensuring you target keywords that identify the town or region you serve. This signals relevancy.
- Linking to and registering with relevant local business directories and citation sites. This helps establish your business identity and location.
This structured data and optimization helps search engines clearly understand your business is a local one serving a particular town, city or region. It also shows the area you provide your products/services in.
- Build high quality relevant local backlinks.The agency should acquire backlinks to your website from authoritative local directories, business listings sites and citation sources. This passes “local authority” to your site and clearly signals the search engines you are a trusted authority business for that specific location. It shows Google, Bing and other search engines in an unambiguous way exactly who you are, that you are credible and trustworthy, and that they should favor showing your business in the local pack and local search results over other non-optimized competitors.
- Develop and publish locally-optimized content.A good agency will create blog posts, guides, videos and other content focused on your geographic region and town/city. For example “The 5 Best Plumbers in Venice, Florida” or “When to Call a Roofing Company in Sarasota”. This provides valuable localized information for your potential customers and strengthens the relevance of your website for those place names. The content will be fully optimized on-page for local search visibility, using location-enhanced title tags, meta descriptions, content, etc.
- Track and report on meaningful ranking and traffic metrics.The agency will implement accurate tracking via analytics and rank checking software to measure important things like:
- Local organic traffic growth
- Local pack rankings improvement
- Growth in keyword rankings for location-enhanced keywords
- Increases in structured citations
- Growth in relevant localized backlinks
At a minimum, they should provide clear reports to keep you fully updated on the progress of all local SEO efforts.
By leveraging the skills and dedication of an experienced local search agency, you can reach more nearby customers in your geographic area and ultimately grow your business. While you focus on daily operations and serving customers, let your SEO agency deploy targeted and structured strategies to substantially boost your local authority, relevance and visibility across the major search engines.