What is Local SEO?

In this digital era, most of you would probably know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. But then what is local SEO and how is it different from traditional SEO?

Local SEO is focused on businesses that are limited by geographical limits. Businesses that are local, and serve a specific location or area, needs local SEO tactics to rank not only the search engines, but also on various Maps and local directories.

Some examples of search influenced by local SEO are:

Goods like:

Pizza or any ready to eat food
Groceries
Farmer’s market
Stationery items
Home repair

Services like:

Car service
Courier/Post office
Salons
Pharmacy

For these types of products and services, you don’t expect to see the names of stores that are 50 miles away from you (unless they are very unique). That’s when local SEO comes into the picture.

You will most likely get the results based on:

Your criteria:
- Your location – where you are searching from
Business criteria:
- Distance:
  - Nearest businesses that can help with your requirements
- Reviews:
  - Businesses that have the highest positive reviews, matching with your search term, review content is also taken into consideration
- Data accuracy and freshness:

Businesses:

- - that are open right now
  - that have the latest & most accurate information like:
    - Logo, Store Hours, Phone number, Address, Website, etc.
  - that have posted special offers
  - that have replied to the most number of reviews
  - that have added relevant pictures
  - that have updated the product & services along with prices (menu)
  - whose website mentions the product/services that you are looking for
  - that have a high number of citations & reviews on local directories like Yellow Pages, Facebook, yelp, Bing, etc.

As you can see, local SEO is not limited to the optimization of the website only unlike traditional SEO that focuses mostly on the website. SEO of a website is one of the many factors that influence the performance of a business having a physical location (brick and mortar).

How can 888 Local SEO help your business?

At 888 Local SEO, we use various automation tools to find out the local SEO performance score of your business. Based on your score, we will provide you a custom roadmap to improve the score. We will prioritize the actions that are most important and has the highest impact on your score.

We don’t provide quote without analyzing your business and its current local SEO score, however we do provide a Free, No-obligation local SEO report that can help you understand your current score.

How much time it takes to improve Local SEO of my business?

Whether it is traditional SEO for website only, or local SEO for a physical business, performance score is heavily dependent on the current score. Businesses and websites that are already optimized may need minor tweaks to rank well, whereas others can take months to reach there. There is no one answer for this question, if someone claims an overnight success, that wont happen.

Someone rightly said:

“an overnight success is usually the result of many years!”

Can I use AI for Local SEO?

While AI has taken the digital world by storm, there are pros and cons of using it. The biggest and most obvious of them could be:

Pros: Ease of processing huge amount of data, and getting help from computers for things that are less creative and more repetitive. It can be a great tool to search through lot of information available on internet and provide us with a summary, which can be used as a reference and directions.
Cons: Search Engines don’t like artificially created synthetic content. There are several case studies where search engines have penalized AI created content, and it will continue to get smarter in identifying AI generated content. There could be severe consequences of using AI created content to manipulate search engines. The worst could be loosing the existing traffic, while trying to increase it.