Here’s What Local SEO Can Do for Australian Small Businesses
Local search engine optimisation (SEO) is so important for Australian small businesses. Without it, you’d be competing with all the search traffic in the country when potential customers try to find your business. They’d never find it. Local SEO helps direct local people to your small business, so they can get their needs met.
With local SEO, your small business can gain online visibility and brand recognition. You’ll get more targeted traffic and that means more useful leads. Local SEO is great marketing, and it may even help you develop a competitive advantage in your local area.
Local SEO Boosts Online Visibility
Local SEO uses location-based keywords to optimise search for a local area. When you search for a sushi restaurant in Perth, for example, you don’t want to get results for restaurants in Sydney. Local SEO can help those Perth restaurants show up in your search engine return pages (SERPs).
You’ll use the same strategies for local SEO that you’d use for any SEO, except you’d use local keywords for title tags, meta descriptions and tags, optimising content, and the like. Local SEO can improve your search rankings and get you to the top of SERPs. That brings increased visibility that can translate into more clicks, and more customers.
You Can Boost Your Brand Recognition
Targeted, geographic keywords and phrases can make it easier for customers to find you, and it can help strengthen your business’s local presence. All of this boosts your brand recognition in the local area. Local SEO should provide customers with all the details they need about your business – address, phone number, operating hours, promotions, events, menus, and brand news and updates. This can help you forge a stronger connection with your customers. It can also help you improve and increase reviews and ratings, which can strengthen your reputation in your community and, by extension, your brand.
You’ll Get More Targeted Traffic and Generate More Leads
Search engine traffic isn’t valuable for its own sake – it’s valuable when it generates more leads and conversions for your business. Local SEO practices are going to get you more targeted traffic from users who are more likely to become customers. Optimising your website for local search guarantees that customers in your area can find you when they want your services.
To maximise local search, keywords should be specific to your location in Australia, and your content should be about topics and events relevant to your location. You also need to make sure your website displays correct contact information for your business. A current address helps search engines identify where you’re located.
Local SEO Is Great Marketing
All SEO is great marketing, and you should be able to hire an SEO agency as far away as Phoenix, Arizona, USA and still get great advice for local SEO, because the principles remain the same. Local SEO is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies you can use, because of its focus on targeting customers in the local area.
That’s a much more efficient way of reaching your customers, especially when you’re a local business that relies on the local community for support. Targeting local keywords makes it much more likely that your site will appear at the top of SERPs and that customers will click through to see what products and services you offer. And, because it’s easy to measure the results of an SEO campaign, you’ll know when your local SEO strategies are working and when they’re not.
You May Develop an Advantage Over Your Local Competitors
Local SEO can help your business pop up in local search results, and that makes it easier to be discovered by potential customers. It can even give you an advantage over your local competitors. That’s because it can help businesses like yours build a strong online presence through social media, review sites, and directory listings. A strong online presence can lend your business credibility and grow customers’ trust in you. That’s something that competitors who haven’t taken the time to improve their local SEO won’t have.
When you’re a small business, your target customer base includes all the people who live in your local area. You probably get more business from members of your community than you do from people living far away, unless you do a lot of digital orders. You need to target your marketing to reach those people in your local area who need your products and services. You need local SEO.
