Whether you operating a salon, a restaurant, a rental service or any other kind of business, chances are there are many other businesses in your town or city offering the same products or services. While it is true that potential customers can still find your business through recommendations from their families and friends, you will need to do more in order for the majority of local consumers (who mainly rely on the internet by the way) to notice your business out of the many similar businesses operating in your city. Local SEO enables you to provide information, directions, and relevant content and make it easily available to local consumers.
Customers are Searching for Local Businesses
When a potential consumer searches the web for a product or service, they are most likely looking for the particular service or business in their locality. For example; if that consumer is looking for a restaurant offering Chinese cuisine, they may key in ‘Chinese restaurant, Orlando into the search engines. Google or any other search engine the searcher used will be looking for websites that have keywords that match or closely match the keyword being searched for and will display these websites in the first page of their results pages.
If you operate a Chinese restaurant in the said locality but have not optimized your website to become more visible or noticeable to local search engines, there is no chance that particular potential customer can find you. Losing one such customer means that your competitor gets one more customer.
Of course you may be listed as a restaurant offering Chinese food in Florida but keep in mind that there are many other businesses like yours operating in Florida. While your website may appear on the second page of the search engine behind many other of your competitors, chances are potential consumers will not be interested in looking beyond the first page. Local SEO opens up your business so much so that clients who would have otherwise never noticed your business get to visit your website. This means that you get to attract more customers to try your services or products.
Local SEO therefore enables you to optimize your website and target local consumers so that they can be able to find your website easily whenever they are looking for information about local services or products in your niche. When your website constantly appears on the top pages of search engines whenever someone is looking for a product in your niche and locality, your credibility will increase and consequently, your rankings on local search engines will also increase.