Local SEO
Become a local hero in the business community by utilising SEO services that target your local area.
What is local SEO?
Local SEO is exactly the same as normal SEO, except the main difference is that local SEO is where the focus in on users who search for location-based keywords instead of general ones. For example, ‘’electrician Sydney’’ is a local SEO search term, and ‘’electrician’’ by itself would be considered a normal SEO term. The purpose of local SEO is to help businesses in a local area attract more customers locally. By being able to be found by their potential customers in local online searches, local businesses are able to reach more people in their serviceable area, thus helping their business become or remain profitable.
Why local SEO is so important
More than half of all online searches have a location in the keyword that is searched. For example, a user in Sydney who is looking for an electrician, in more cases than not will search for ‘’electrician Sydney’’, and not just ‘’electrician’’. Because of this, you want to be found when users search for these location specific keywords.
Get noticed in your local area
More people are using Google and other search engines to find local businesses than ever before. For this reason, targeting customers based on their location using local SEO can prove to be extremely successful. With around 80% of major purchases starting with online research, it’s safe to say that your business virtually doesn’t exist to your local customers if you can’t be found by them online. Furthermore, if you want to be found by customers in your local area, you need to be on the first page of a search result, as 75% of people don’t scroll past the first page of the SERP.
Local searches have a significantly higher chance of being a potential customer
Another important aspect of local SEO is that the users searching for location specific keywords are generally people looking for a product or service to buy right now. They have generally done their research on what it is they are looking for, and are now searching for a local business to provide it. This is further backed up by the statistic that 85% of local searches turn into a paying customer within 24 hours.
Have your customers feel comfortable before coming to your business
Over 70% of customers of local businesses say that they conducted a search online about a local business before physically visiting it, as they wanted to know more about who they were going to see. With this being said, it is very important that your online presence is prominent, and that you are delivering the message to your customers that you want online, before they come to see you in person.
Local SEO provides the highest ROI (return on investment) than any other type of SEO
With such a high conversion rate of searches to paying customers, and the fact that the intent is to find a place to do business with when doing a location-based search, local SEO provides businesses with the highest ROI. Sure, it can take a few months to start seeing your rankings improve online, as that’s the nature of SEO, but once your websites rankings improve, you will start to see a consistent flow of inbound customers. Also, the cost for an SEO agency to be able to provide good local SEO is lower that say trying to compete at a national level, the monthly cost ongoing is much easier to manage.
How long does local SEO take to work?
As mentioned in our SEO section, normal SEO can take anywhere from 6 to 12 months before you see significant results. This can be true also with local SEO, however there are some factors to consider which actually can make local SEO work a bit faster.
Keywords being targeted play a significant role in determining how long it will take for a keyword to rank
If you are targeting local keywords instead of say general ones, in the vast majority of cases you find it much easier to improve your rankings. As an example, trying to rank in Australia for the term ‘’electrician’’ might be a little bit difficult, as the search volume could be say 20,000 searches a month. With the high level of search volume, it means that a lot of businesses would be competing to get onto the first page of the SERP. However with the location specific term ‘’electrician Sydney’’, that might only have a search volume of say 1,000 searches a month. This shows that the local keywords would have less competition and therefore in theory are easier and faster to rank.
How many of the same type of business exist in the local area being targeted
This factor can play a significant role in the level of difficulty involved in ranking for local SEO. If you are an electrician in a city such as Sydney where there could literally be 1000 electricians, then ranking for a local keyword like ‘’electrician Sydney’’ can be quite difficult. However if you are an electrician in a smaller town such as Mildura in Victoria, where there are say only 35 electricians, then ranking on the first page of a local search would be significantly easier. As a general rule, the more businesses in a local area providing the same service, the harder it can be to rank for local keywords, as more businesses are competing for the same terms. This can increase the time it takes for your website to rank in the SERP.
How many of your competitors have utilized local SEO
With the increase in businesses using local SEO to help them gain a bigger portion of their local market, how many of them that actually use local SEO will help determine how hard it will be to rank for specific keywords, and how long it will take. If your business is in an area where not many businesses have used local SEO on their website, or they have poor quality SEO, then it is safe to say that it wont take as long to rank in comparison to an area where lots of businesses have invested heavily in being on the first page of local searches.
How much you want to invest in improving your local SEO rankings
Local SEO, if we had to give you a figure, would cost a minimum of $1,000.00 a month to get you decent results. However, if you were able to invest more, then more work could be done to help improve your rankings faster. If time is of the essence and you have the budget, then investing more money can help improve your position faster than if you could only invest say $1,000.00 a month. However, this also depends on the factors mentioned previously. If you are in a low competition area, then throwing more money at your local SEO plan isn’t needed, as not as much work is required to rank for these localized keywords. If you are in a highly competitive area, then yes, investing more can help speed up the process.
What work is involved in local SEO?
Analysing your local competitors website and marketing strategies, then going above and beyond what they are doing is a key part of your SEO campaign. With a comprehensive analysis of your competitors website, we will be able to build a plan to out perform them at every step.
Using the keywords selected from the previous step, we can write content for your website which helps your local customers and search engines understand your offering, and in turn assist in putting your website high up on search results.
Good content on your website is a very important element on SEO, so we create a regular schedule for updating the content on your website, to ensure it’s relevant and shows your customers and google that you are constantly investing in your business, thus helping with rankings.
Before we can provide a quote, or do any local SEO work for you, we need to audit your existing website. What are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities for growth? With this information, we can start a roadmap for targeting your desired demographic.
Your on-page SEO are things like image optimisation, improving the loading time of your website, internal link structure and so on to help search engines read your website faster and more efficiently.
Search volume, short tail, location specific and long tail keywords, we find out what the public are searching for, and select the keywords that are popular and relevant to your business.
We will remove all negative or broken backlinks your current website has, and begin an organic white hat link building strategy, to help grow your websites authority in your industry and service areas.
Ready to take the next step?
Contact Extension Group to have an obligation free analysis of your website, and start the journey to more customers and more sales!
How To Get Started on SEO with Extension Group
We have a simple 4 step process which we go through with our customers to get set up to help with their SEO. First, we will have a quick 5 to 10 minute chat about your business and what you are looking to achieve with SEO. Then, we will work out a strategy to be able to achieve these results for your business. From there, depending on the product that you have chosen with us, we will assist with the following steps whether it be build you a new website or update your existing one, and then finally once you are making money from your SEO, you can decide whether or not you want to stay with us.
For more information, click here to view how our process works.