What Are the Benefits of Local SEO?

As a local business owner, you may feel there’s little point in investing time and money to optimize your Google presence when you’re competing with Walmart and Amazon for top-tier rankings. That might be true for the main organic search results, but it’s not the case for local search. 

Whether you have a physical brick-and-mortar location or serve a particular geographical area, local SEO allows you to better connect with people in your neighborhood, town, or city. That’s important given that 80% of US consumers search online for local businesses on a weekly basis.

Benefits of local SEO 

1. Better online visibility: Local SEO activity, such as citation and link building, increases your online visibility, making your business more easily discoverable by new customers.
2. More in-store foot traffic: Greater local visibility brings more foot traffic to your bricks-and-mortar location.
3. Tap into local shopping boom: More than half of consumers prefer to shop locally and support local businesses or smaller brands. Local SEO puts you in contention for those new business opportunities.
4. Targeted web traffic: Optimizing your site for local search delivers more targeted traffic to your website which can lead to more leads, subscriptions, sign-ups, and sales.
5. More calls: Google Business Profile optimization can lead to enhanced Google Maps visibility. This can lead to more calls and more in-person visits.
6. Thought leadership: Content marketing can help you establish a thought leadership position and be seen as an expert in your field.
7. Enhanced trust levels: Reputation management builds trust in your business.
8. More sales: Consumers are known to use online reviews to help with decision-making when choosing a local business.
9. Improved conversion rate: Website optimization can bolster your conversion rate, increasing contact form submissions, phone calls, email subscriptions, or sales.
10. More competitive: Local SEO also makes you more competitive as it encourages you to study what your rivals are doing well and what tactics are working for them to then integrate into your own approach.

This is Why Local SEO is Important

Imagine you’re a bridal boutique in Charlotte, North Carolina. Your ideal customer is a bride-to-be actively looking for ‘bridal boutique, Charlotte, North Carolina’. However, the organic search results are populated by big-name brands such as directory sites, top 10 lists, and blogs. This makes it hard to compete and difficult to imagine a route for the bride to find her way to your store.

However, if you perform local SEO, you’ll appear at the top of the search results and in the Local Pack with useful information such as opening times, your phone number and location, an image, and your five-star review rating. The bride-to-be can see you’re close by, offer a great service, and can easily plan a visit or call your store. You’re now in the running to make a sale.

Run a Local SEO Audit in Minutes

Analyze 300+ key data points in one go

Get Started with Local Search Auditing _{14-day Free Trial}

The 10 Benefits of Local SEO

1. Better Online Visibility 

Many of the activities associated with local SEO will help you improve your visibility in local search results and build better overall online visibility. 

Citation building, for example, is a staple of local SEO activity. This involves building mentions of your company’s name, its physical address (ideally including zip code), and phone number via directory listings, social media profiles, and online review platforms. 

Because you’ll do this in as many different places as possible, it’s easier for your business to be found by the right people (those interested in your specific product or service in their local area) at the right time (when they’re actively searching for a business like yours). If you’re running a B&B in Upstate New York, for example, a Tripadvisor NAP could help interested guests find you and make a reservation.

It’s important to keep the data across these listings, too, as 62% of consumers would avoid using a business if they found incorrect information online.

2. More In-store Foot Traffic

Greater local visibility can help to bring more foot traffic to your bricks-and-mortar location, whether you’re a cafe, dry cleaner, or hardware store. If you’ve invested heavily in specialist equipment, designed an innovative space, or have a brick-and-mortar location because your products are best experienced in person, growing the number of people stopping by can help you create a buzz about your space and make more sales. 

3. Tap Into the Local Shopping Boom

Recent years have seen widespread changes in consumer buying habits. One of the most notable is that today’s consumers increasingly prioritize local businesses when it comes to making purchasing decisions. 

One of the core benefits of local SEO is it puts you in front of local consumers exactly when they need your products or services. As a result, this can empower you to fully leverage this shift in buyer behavior to grow your business. 

4. Targeted Web Traffic

As a small business, every minute you spend dealing with unqualified leads or people who aren’t likely to make a purchase or book a service is money lost. 

Local SEO can help weed out irrelevant traffic and remove time-wasters that prevent your business from running efficiently, helping ensure your business is only visible to search users in your local area. 

With 72% of consumers using Google to search for local business information, this can be a significant advantage as it allows you to focus your resources on those customers most likely to convert. 

5. More Calls and Visits from Maps Users

Optimizing your Google Business Profile can enhance your visibility on Google Maps. This, in turn, can lead to more calls and in-person visits since Google Maps was specifically designed to help users find local services and plan their journeys. 

Google Maps is populated using information that Google gleans from Business Profiles, so any Google Business Profile optimization you carry out will directly aid your Maps visibility, increasing your number of calls and in-person visits.

6. Establish a Position of Thought Leadership 

Performing content marketing and link building is necessary to establish prominence and relevance, two of the core pillars of local SEO rankings. This same activity can also help you to cultivate a reputation as a thought leader and expert in your field. 

Local content marketing should naturally involve talking about your local area or hometown and involving your local community. Not only does this help grow your position as an expert voice, but it can also bring your customers closer to your business, building stronger links, brand loyalty, and increasing engagement.

When you take the time to create locally-focused evergreen resources you’re also more likely to receive links back to your site from other local businesses. These links, whether from a local source like your town newspaper or an industry-specific site (like your local chamber of commerce) can all add to your authority and credibility, helping position you as an expert in your field. 

7. Enhanced Trust Levels 

It’s no secret that reviews are a cornerstone of local SEO success and a key local search ranking factor. The more reviews you get as part of your reputation management strategy, the more visibility you’ll earn in local search. 

Reviews are also an essential ingredient for building consumer trust—a vital attribute that precedes any business transaction. 

Research confirms that more consumers than ever before are reading online reviews more regularly, and nearly half say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. 

Greater visibility, combined with top-rated, fresh reviews, is a magic formula for both local pack prominence and higher levels of consumer trust.

8. More Sales

Consumers use online reviews to help with the decision-making process when choosing a local business. Around one in eight people go online to find information about a local business more than once a week. 

Being able to present them with authentic recommendations from their peers for your business as a result of your reputation management activity is a powerful benefit and underlines just why local SEO is important. 

9. Improved Conversion Rates

When asking, ‘What are the benefits of local SEO?’ it’s easy to focus attention on what’s happening on Google and other platforms, but it can also play a direct role in improving the structure and performance of your own website. 

Website optimization tasks carried out for local SEO, such as adding new locally-focused optimization, reviewing landing page text, and working on page load speed, all help with conversion rate optimization (CRO). From there, you should see an increase in the number of conversions your site generates, including increases in contact form submissions, more phone calls, email subscriptions, or sales. 

10. Your Business Becomes More Competitive

An important part of developing and refining your local SEO strategy is benchmarking competitors and identifying what they’re doing better than you. Research suggests that the most successful brands invest in local SEO strategy: 94% of high-performing brands have a dedicated local marketing strategy, compared to 60% of average-performing brands.

Identifying these opportunities to improve (and being able to put the things they have learned into practice without the trial-and-error they may have gone through to arrive at a successful strategy) puts your business on a much more competitive footing. Studying their reviews, for example, could tell you what customers appreciate about their service so you can incorporate a similar approach within your own business.

Up next:

Google Local Pack: What Is It and How Does It Work?

Continue learning