Local SEO: Can your Small Business Compete Without It?

Local SEO is always an important piece of optimization in a company's internet marketing strategy, but if you run a small business, local SEO goes beyond important to imperative. If you are not convinced that local SEO is a good use of your time, just take a few minutes to look at the Google Analytics data on your website. Filter the information to show mobile searches only (simply choose "mobile" from the "advanced segment" menu at the top of the page). What do you see?

In the days of its infancy, mobile web users were novel. Now, mobile internet users are the standard. Mobile users are looking for locally optimized data, and their search behavior is often very different from a typical internet search. Mobile visitors visit fewer pages than web visitors, on average. It only makes sense - it is pretty difficult to do in-depth research on a tiny screen. If a site's layout is not optimized for mobile browsing, a searcher will often spend even less time on the site. Local SEO can help set your site up for mobile, making it easy to find your company's physical location and phone number for those who want to make an immediate visit and purchase.

Brick-and-mortar stores are fully-reliant on locally optimized data. People searching for locally-driven data are often ready to make an immediate purchase. If your small business is not ranking at the top of search, you are losing your customers to the local SEO optimized competitor down the street. Many companies take local SEO a step further and incorporate micro-sites that appeal to searchers outside of big city borders. An example would be a specialty toy store that (because of its location) draws customers from both Dallas and the northern suburbs. The main site would, most likely, be optimized for Dallas, using Dallas zip codes and verbiage specific to the Metroplex. But, if research indicates that many searchers from Frisco, Plano, Allen and McKinney are looking for the toy store, a few micro-sites might be a good idea.

These sites are built off the framework of a company's original website, but use separate URLs and page content to increase local SEO for each specific town. Search engines, especially Google, put a lot of weight on sites that reveal city-specific content. To illustrate, let's say the store's website is www.thebestdarntoystoreindallas.com (someone smart will register that URL). Micro-sites with relevant content would be built to populate www.bestdarntoystoreindallas.com/plano, with the same principal being applied to micro-sites for Allen, McKinney and Frisco. These sites give users what they need, but also serve as a great local SEO tool to boost web listings within search. Local SEO is a very involved process. It is constantly evolving. Local search is currently dominating web search in both Google and Bing. Is your small business competing?

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