Local Search Engine Optimisation
Why local SEO is important to your business
As a business owner, you've probably heard about SEO before. Short for Search Engine Optimisation, it's the process of helping potential customers find your website on the Internet.
As an example, let’s say you own a French restaurant in Brisbane, and you’re famous for your oysters and apricot soufflé. You’re known around the neighbourhood as the place to go on a date or when you want to celebrate a special occasion.
Because this hypothetical business is local and catering to a Brisbane audience, it would be a mistake to try to rank for search terms like “oysters” or simply “best restaurant.” These terms are general and aren’t intent-based. Someone searching for oysters online might be curious about what they are, what they taste like, and if they’re an aphrodisiac. Someone searching for “best restaurant” might be interested in learning about popular cuisine or identifying the highest-ranked restaurant in the world.
While this type of global SEO is valuable for other kinds of businesses, it’s not the technique that we employ for local businesses. In local SEO, our goal is to make sure our clients show up on the top of Google and the other search engines whenever a serious buyer is looking for their product or services. So, in our French restaurant example, anyone in or near Brisbane looking for a fine dining experience would discover our client’s restaurant online before seeing any other options.
Local SEO is one of the most important, and often overlooked strategies for local businesses. When you employ this strategy, prepare to be flooded with qualified prospects and visitors.
We are results focused
Local SEO isn’t just about plugging some keywords into your website. We take a holistic approach, so your site not only shows up at the top of the search engines, but it gets the click.
We start by:
- Attracting prospects that are the most likely to turn into customers;
- Optimising how you appear in search results to encourage customers to take the actions you want; and
- Boosting your rankings in searches and location queries.
Local SEO is intent-based
A lot of research has been done about how local populations use search engines and what actions they take during and after a search. Some key findings from 2019 showed the following:
- 88% of local business searches performed on a mobile device resulted in a call or visit to the company within just 24 hours.
- 78% of these searches also resulted in an offline purchase.
- The instance of online searches containing the terms “near me” or “close by” increased over 900% in the last two years.
What these statistics are telling us is that people searching for local businesses online have a clear intent to purchase, and they plan on doing it straight away.
