For Small Businesses and Multi-Location Brands
Find local customers in your district, town or county.
If you’re new to Local SEO, it’s a specialist area of SEO used to ensure your business and/or website is found by people who are either (a) based near your business address when they are searching for your products or services or (b) use your location in their search query. Examples of Local SEO searches for a law firm in London could be (a) a person in London who searches for “lawyers” or (b) a person outside of London who searches for “lawyers in London”. SEO techniques are needed by any business that serves customers local to them and has one or more business addresses like offices or shops. That can mean anything from a single office to a national chain with hundreds of shops all over the country. This page is specifically about Local SEO. Here is our local SEO services page if you want that. The definition of the word local in terms of geographical area depends on the niche and the context. For hairdressers, local might mean the same town, whereas for lawyers, local is more likely to mean a wider area e.g. the same county
Google Web Search
Local searchers may see your business appear in Google’s normal web search results, in google’s local business results, on google maps, in google’s image search results and more.
Get a close up of what local search results look like in google on a search for “SEO Surrey”.
When people are searching for your product and want to find a local supplier, they will often search in Google or another search engine using a phrase like “Your Product/Service” + “Your County” or “Your Product/Service” + “Your Town” for example “solicitors camberley”, “restaurants in surrey”. In our case, those search terms would include “SEO Surrey”, “SEO in Surrey”, “SEO Camberley” and so on.
Generally, it’s easier to get your business appearing on page 1 of google for a “product + town” type search than for a “product + county” search simply because you are competing with fewer businesses. Here’s the result for a search on “SEO Camberley”.
If you search in google for your own business’s products or service using “your product and your town or county”, does your business appear in the local business results? If not, and you would like it to, please get in touch for a free, no obligation discussion.
Google Maps Search
If the searcher is especially interested in seeing, at a glance, all the suppliers of a particular product or service within a certain distance of them, they may use Google Maps to search. So, it’s vital that your business appears on Google maps if you serve local customers. A smaller map may also appear above the local business results in a normal web search, as shown in the images above. If you would like help with optimisation for google maps search, please contact us.
Here are a couple of examples of Google Maps search results for local search queries.
More About Local SEO
The term Local SEO normally refers to the SEO techniques needed by businesses wishing to target their local customers. However, we may also be your local SEO!
Whilst SEO services can be provided online and remotely from anywhere in the world, many people still prefer to deal with local SEO companies for a variety of reasons, including being able to meet in person. There are also many important factors in addition to those above, that can make it advantageous to use a local SEO.
Local SEO is becoming more and more important as Google and the other search engines tailor their results by giving priority to businesses that are in the same geographic location as the shopper or surfer. This means that a person in one part of the country typing a keyword into Google will be presented with a different set of results from another person, in a different location, typing exactly the same keyword. This is particularly true if the services they are looking for are typically associated with local suppliers.
Google uses a variety of techniques and sources of information to determine your location when you are searching online. When you search for products or services that Google associates with local businesses, it will do its best to show you a healthy proportion of local businesses in its results pages – even if you do not specify the location in your search term.
It is a common misperception that it is just too tough to get the number 1 ranking in Google for the most attractive keywords because the big players must be dominating all the best positions but this is not true. When you are targeting a specific local geographic market, it is often possible to dominate your local market in the search engine results pages where you may stand little chance for the same keyword at a national level. There is a different set of techniques required for Local SEO which can sometimes provide a substantial advantage for local businesses over national businesses.
That’s why it can sometimes make sense to use a local SEO agency that is familiar with the local online market in your sector and the search engine marketing techniques required to dominate it. If you have a business based in Camberley or Surrey or indeed any business wishing to target a local customer base anywhere in the country and would like to learn more about how Local SEO techniques can help you dominate your town, county or region, please get in touch for a no obligation discussion.
Please contact us to discuss our Local SEO services or read more on our local SEO services page.