Local SEO

Why You Should Take A Very Good Look At Local SEO

As a small business owner you may be very well aware that there are millions of websites and billions of webpages on the Internet. More than likely you will use the Internet yourself to search for various products or services or to access your favourite social network. You will be more than aware of how many choices there seem to be when it comes to the selection of a product or service and this might be holding you back somewhat from making a decision to improve or expand your own business website. Perhaps you haven't even established a site as yet, or have what amounts to a placeholder which is getting no traffic. You may feel that there is simply too much competition in your particular niche to make any investment in time and effort here worthwhile. However, you may simply be wrong.

Second guess what the search engines are trying to do

Think for a minute what the search engines are setting out to do. It's their job, in essence, to try and provide the most targeted information possible to people who are searching for solutions by using their particular search engine. Google, in particular, is becoming increasingly good at what they do and have very complicated algorithms to help them determine the best sites accordingly. This giant search engine company based in California makes most of its money from selling adverts to organisations which are then displayed to people who are searching for targeted keywords. As you can see, Google is not going to continue to make significant streams of income from selling these advertisements unless they provide the best solution to advertisers and searchers alike.

Armed with this information, we can start to understand just why Google returns the results that they do and how, in many respects, they seem to be able to read our minds

They are often able to determine where we are based according to our ISP address and they imagine that we are looking for information about a particular organisation, product or service with a business address which is geographically close to where we are. Their assumption is that armed with the information that we get from the associated website we may be able to travel quite easily to their physical location to do business with them. This is known as local SEO. It's something that you, as a small business owner who believes that there is simply too much competition on the Web, should pay a lot of attention to.

There are particular ways of establishing an online presence and optimising your website so that it, too, can find its way into those search engine result pages

If you're a plumber in Milton Keynes, for example, you might be concerned that there is simply too much competition for the keyword "plumber" and not feel as if it's worth your while trying to optimise your website for that search term. However, there is considerably less opposition for the keyword "Milton Keynes plumber" or "plumber Milton Keynes." If you think about it for a second, these are the search terms that people will likely be entering into the search box, or they may represent what the search engine returns to searchers, based on the searcher’s own geographical, ISP address. By very specifically targeting your SEO, locally, you have the opportunity to find potentially surprising success.