If you’re a B2B business, you probably already understand and engage in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to make your website more visible to potential customers across the country. But if you provide goods or services to businesses in your local area, make sure you’re not overlooking another valuable strategy — local SEO.
Local SEO targets customers in your local area who are actively searching for nearby products and services. These are “hot” leads who are ready to buy, with 76% of customers who use “near me” to search visiting the physical location of a local business within a day.
If that sounds like a market you’d like to tap into, read on. This ultimate guide will cover everything from basic to advanced local SEO strategies and give you the tools you need to help catapult your brand into the consciousness of your ideal customers.
Like Business to Business (B2B) SEO, local SEO strategies are designed to improve your site’s visibility in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The difference is it revolves around search queries with local area names, includes the words “near me,” or implies local intent by using terms related to physical businesses.
Adding these additional qualifiers narrows the field. Instead of jockeying for position with every other business in your field across the country, your website will only be competing with businesses that have a physical presence in your local area.
Know how serious the purchase intent behind local searches is? 76% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a physical place within 24 hours, and 28% of those searches result in a purchase. Local SEO strategies connect your business with these potential customers at the exact moment they are searching for services or products like yours, driving more foot traffic to your physical location.
If your business has a physical location where it conducts business, local SEO should be a top priority for driving traffic to your business.
Your local SEO strategy should consist of several parts: your Google Business Profile, local keyword research, on-page SEO optimization and mentions of your name, address and phone number (NAP) in directories, articles, etc. And don’t neglect reputation management. It takes a lot of work to build a good name — make sure you protect it!
Let’s take a look at these individually.
Google has conducted a great deal of very expensive research to find out exactly what customers are looking for and how to serve it to them a silver platter. The result of this is the beautifully streamlined and effective Google Business Profile. It’s elegant, it serves searchers exactly what they’re looking for quickly and easily, and shows up at the top of search results. It’s also free, so there’s no excuse for not having one as one of your local SEO strategies.
Your profile gives potential customers important information all in one place in a format that they’re accustomed to. This includes your basic business information, such as location, hours, phone number, and website address, an overview of your business, and customer reviews. Since only 44% of small businesses have claimed their Google Business Profile, optimizing your business’ profile can put you ahead of your local competition.
According to Google, customers are 2.7 times more likely to consider a business reputable if they find a complete Business Profile on Google Search and Maps. Also they’re 70% more likely to visit and 50% more likely to consider purchasing from these businesses.
If you’d like to tap into some of these impressive numbers, the first step is optimizing your profile. Here’s how:
Want visitors to flock to your Google Business Profile? Don’t just fill out your profile and forget it — stay active and engaged. Some ways to generate organic visits for your Google Business Profile keep your profile updated are to engage your visitors with new posts, special offers, and events. Businesses that take the time to respond to their reviews show you value your customers’ opinions and prioritize their experiences. This is another opportunity for you to make your business stand out, so be sure your responses are in-line with your business’ messaging and use its voice.
Staying engaged with your customers not only improves your online reputation and generates organic visits for your Google Business Profile but also keeps your listing active in the eyes of Google, which can help boost your ranking.
Keyword research is just as important to your local SEO strategies as it is in traditional SEO. The only difference is these keywords will also show local intent.
Keyword tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, Moz, SEMrush, and Ahrefs can help you compile a list of keywords used in recent local searches. Research into popular local searches can also show you where your competitors are succeeding and help reveal opportunities for popular, less competitive keywords where you can boost your ranking your local market.
Once you have your local keywords in hand, you can use them to optimize your web pages.
Having your name, address, and phone number (NAP) cited on other websites not only gives customers more ways to find you but also helps build your business’ authority in your local area. When you create your listings:
If you’re like most people, you don’t need any explanation for why online reviews are so important because you’ve probably used them yourself. As the ultimate social proof of the quality of your goods or services, online reviews can give a huge boost to your rankings, and collecting them should be part of your local SEO strategy. Not only do businesses with a large number of positive reviews appear higher in search results, but a large number of positive reviews can also improve your profile’s click-through rate. It’s not hard to work on your reviews and reputation. It just takes a small amount of consistent effort. Here’s how you can do it:
If you’ve already mastered the basics and want to do more, these advanced local SEO strategies can take your results even further:
With more searches on mobile devices than desktop computers, mobile optimization needs to be your primary focus. Google’s mobile-first indexing considers your site’s mobile version as primary for search rankings.
Mobile-first indexing looks at:
Social media platforms can be an excellent way of boosting visibility in your local community. But do your research — content needs to be platform specific, and your potential customers are likely to prefer specific platforms over others, depending on your industry. You don’t want to waste time trying to cultivate an audience on a sparsely used platform and neglect a thriving community on another.
The best ways to reach your audience are:
Local searches can be conducted on traditional search engines such as Google, but they also pop up on local search platforms like Google Maps, review sites like Yelp, and voice searches on Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri. As digital assistants become more and more popular, making your website more visible to them becomes more important.
You can make your website more voice-search friendly by:
For the best performance, you need feedback. Tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and local SEO-specific tools can track your website’s performance to let you know what is working and what isn’t so you can modify your strategy and/or its execution.
Metrics to look at:
If you’re finding it a bit overwhelming to manage your local SEO services, you’re not alone. Most businesses are already stretched thin, and local SEO often gets put on the back burner as something to take on when every other task is already complete. The problem with this approach is that even as you add it to your “to-do” list, you may already know this is a task you may never get to. And even if you do take it on, you’ll most likely let years pass between each “monthly” update.
If you don’t have a dedicated marketing team that can put in consistent time and attention on your local SEO services, the simplest and most cost-effective strategy is to partner with a local SEO agency or expert. Local SEO agencies and experts stay up-to-date with the latest updates and industry trends, and because they work extensively on local SEO with multiple companies, they have local SEO strategies in place that are proven to give high-quality results.
At VantagePoint Marketing, we’re a local SEO agency that has been helping B2B clients reach their target audiences for more than 30 years. With an average of over 15 years of experience in their fields, our experienced team of B2B marketers know chasing fads or using gray-hat tactics is not a sustainable way to get results. Instead, we work with our clients to build a long-term, holistic B2B SEO strategy that understands user intent, creates and optimizes content for each phase of the long B2B buying cycle, and helps your business boost its search engine rankings to break through the noise and connect with more targeted potential customers.
