Local SEO is the new word of mouth publicity in a digital way.
Do you own a small or medium-sized business and want to expand it to a large extent? Of course, the words of mouth will help you expand it initially. How? Let me give you an example. Imagine, you have a small cupcake shop and initially, your targeted buyers will be the people around your locality. You will buy some quality cupcakes for them. If they like it, they will slowly start talking about it to their acquaintances and some of them even can pay a visit to your store to make a purchase. Let’s say, every one out of ten listeners will follow the same and slowly the number of your potential customer will start to increase. That’s how the word of mouth can help grow your business at a very initial level.
But this has some limitations too. This phase can literally be too slow and frustrating for you that you may end up thinking to give up on your new business. So what’s the way out? To save you from this tragedy, here we will make you familiar with the concept of local SEO and Google my business. This will not only save your time, efforts, and energy but also will make a surge in the number of your buyers in a strategic and most effective way.
In the era of digitalization, it is quite necessary for your business to make an online presence to beat the market competition. SEO or search engine optimization plays a significant role in making your business visible to potential customers. A proper SEO strategy is needed to make your business rank number one on the SERP or Search engine result page that can turn the visitors of the website into potential customers. Now, there come some questions that may pop up in our minds very frequently- what is Local SEO or google my business?
How does local SEO work? How it can affect the small or medium businesses around you? Let’s hop into the topic here.
SEO or search engine optimization is also known as search marketing and local SEO is nothing but a small branch of the SEO strategy. Before diving into the matter completely, let me ask you a question. Do you know the difference between a standard informational search and a local search? No? Then keep reading this article to have a crystal clear idea about this.
Statistics have shown that 46% of the total search on google is made with the intention to get information about a local business. Nowadays, anyone around this world, with decent SEO skills can rank his/her business number one on the SERP. Now imagine, you have made a search on google with the keywords ‘renowned beauty parlor‘. The first result that you got on the SERP has led you to the website of a US-based parlor whereas you are an inhabitant of India. Did you really want to make a search about a parlor that you can never visit or from where you can never get service on a real-time basis? How ridiculous it is!
Here comes the significance of local SEO. Local SEO gathers all the information about the services around us or near our locality so that when we make a search on google about something, we can get the most relevant and easy-to-access results.
Here, let me give you a brief introduction to Google my business. Imagine you are walking on the streets. You have previously searched for a local shop online, you went to their website, got the address, and wanted to have a real-time experience with the shop. But somehow you can not find it at the location and now you are stuck in the middle of the road. What will you do? Either you can ask the locals there or, can search for the shop on Google Maps if the shop has already made its location online with Google Maps. This is exactly the purpose of Google my business. You get a real-time idea of the direction of your desired shop or organization.
Now, let’s talk about some crucial points on local SEO or Google my business.
So what is local SEO or Google my business?
Local SEO is basically a relatively smaller branch of (national) SEO where the target viewers of the page are the local ones. We often search on google like a cafe ‘near me’, hospitals ‘near my area’, airport ‘in the city name’ right? And the result we see on the search engine result page after that is mainly because of local SEO or google my business. Google my business is nothing but to create a physical appearance of your business on the google map, to increase the feasibility so that the potential customers can visit your store or organization for some offline business as well. The next question comes,
How does local SEO (Google my business) work?
Suppose you have a small bakery. The products that are available there are mainly bread, biscuits, cakes, etc. It’s quite obvious the target buyer of your products will be within your locality first and slowly the business can expand in the town/city. But how to do it in an effective yet easy way? The answer to this is by Google listing your business. Studies have proved that a customer can visit the store physically and make a purchase within 24 hours of searching for the store on google. So the importance of google’s presence in your store has an immense effect on the success rate of your business. Now the third and most important question comes,
Who can be benefited from local SEO:
Any local small and medium-sized business can be benefited from local SEO or google my business, be it a medical organization, a parlor, a local electronic shop, and so on. It’s easy as pie. There are certain really easy yet strategic plans available related to local SEO. You follow that rule and watch your business booming in a while. The unpaid, natural, or ‘organic’ traffic you will get to your website will definitely take your business to the next level.
So here is a small and simple article on the importance of local SEO and google my business listing. We hope this will give you a crystal clear idea and make you understand what you should do next in order to expand and grow your business locally and reach out to each and every potential buyer.
