If you own a local business, catching the online attention of your potential customers is super important. Nowadays, most people utilize their smartphones and search for local stores. Interestingly, about 72% of these searchers end up visiting a store that’s located within a 5-mile radius of their place. Plus, local searches with “near me” have spiked up by 900% over the past two years. So, if your business doesn’t appear in these search results, chances are your competition might snap up those customers!
Now, making your website pop in local search results isn’t rocket science, but it does need some clever tweaks specific to local SEO.
One key trick is to bring out the local flavor in your website content. For instance, if you have a flower shop in Boise, don’t just post articles about caring for roses. Remix those articles with a dash of local vibe like ‘caring for roses in the Boise climate,’ and sprinkle a few Boise landmarks into the mix. This approach, known as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), will pepper your site with city-related keywords boosting its visibility in local searches.
Another nifty idea is to make your location stand out in your website’s header. Let’s say you own a candy store in San Francisco. By placing your shop’s address in the header, visitors can immediately identify where you’re located. This prevents any confusion for your customers and helps you feature in local searches more frequently.
Traditional SEO strategies still matter; creating location-specific content or using LSI keywords alone won’t get you to the top. You need a strong backlink profile, properly crafted page titles and descriptions, and maybe even run some paid ads. Plus, turning your site into a helpful local resource is a huge win. For instance, if you are a coffee shop, provide handy tips for home baristas. If you are a hotel, share exciting stuff about local festivals and hotspots for tourists.
Finally, don’t forget the microdata in your website known as schema markups. Adding these codes in your website’s header helps Google understand more about your business.
Remember, if you have a brick-and-mortar store, you definitely need local SEO. Google is smart and knows where its users are located, so when they search “Italian restaurant,” it will present local results even without ‘near me’ or a specific zip code. So ensure Google understands your business is in that locale to make sure you don’t miss out.
So, with these tips, go jazz up your website and grab the attention of all those local searchers out there!