Local SEO: how to promote your website and attract visitors who live nearby

Many people are convinced that SEO optimization is ineffective in attracting people who plan to visit a workshop, office or store. However, the IT company Golden Web hastens to assure you that local SEO optimization is an important marketing tool for the development of small local businesses, chains of stores, service companies, etc., the use of which allows you to find new opportunities and competitive advantages for growth.

What is local SEO and how does it work? When promoting websites, you need to make sure that the address of your company, workshops, and retail outlets is listed on the website and that the number of technical problems on the website is minimized or reduced to zero.

Google My Business is the main tool for local website promotion, which allows you to collect and manage information about the results of the search and the place of your company in them, on Google Maps and collect user reviews. In other words, Google My Business is your company's business card on the Internet, which can be viewed by every user. Using your account allows you to post, supplement and update personal information.

The main advantages of registering with Google Business are:

● Additional website clicks. When entering a search query related to your company's industry or name, the user will see not the standard link to the website with its 200-character description, but an extended description with a logo, photo, list of main services and opening hours. This, in turn, increases the number of clicks from the search results.

● Additional interaction with the target audience. Google Business allows you to place a company card on Google Maps, which increases the chances of potential navigator users to navigate to search for services. If you provide services offline, then the need to register on Google Maps using Google Business increases, since this service can become the main source of new customers on the Internet in the future.

● Benefits of local SEO website optimization. Posting additional information about your company through Google My Business, including your business, address, and main services, can affect your ranking in local search results.

● Increase the trust of potential customers thanks to the ability to leave reviews and comments in product cards and posting high-quality photos and detailed descriptions.

● Increased brand awareness. If a company's logo, name, and photo are placed in search results, the chances of users remembering the brand increase.

If you are just starting your own online marketing, the IT company Golden Web recommends starting with creating and optimizing a Google My Business account. This does not require any money or a lot of time, Google Business already provides your company with the first web representation. While the development and corporate promotion of sites are being carried out, such a company card will serve as a website-business card.

Undoubtedly, Google Business is an extremely useful service if you know the key features of its use when creating a company card.

► First, any user can make changes . Google Maps users can suggest changes to business information, and the service, accordingly, can approve them in the event of dozens of similar suggestions from other users. Thus, people who use the service on a regular basis independently contribute to updating the information and correcting its inaccuracies. At the same time, it is worth remembering that anyone can jokingly change information about a business, for example, by indicating its incorrect address or name, using several fake accounts. One of the latest striking examples is the renaming of dozens of objects in the Russian Federation in honor of the popular Internet meme hero Ricardo Milos. That is why we recommend periodically checking the data in your company card.

► Secondly, when optimizing your site, remember that you cannot moderate user reviews and ratings on your own . On the one hand, this increases the trust of potential customers in your company if they read the reviews, and on the other hand, you remain vulnerable to your competitors who will use various tools, for example, leaving negative comments under the guise of a customer, to maximally reduce your reputation. If you clearly managed to identify the order of a particular review or comment, golden-web.digital recommends contacting Google support to have it removed, but you must provide irrefutable evidence of its falsity.

► Thirdly, your card has its own rating . When a user enters the name of a service in the field in which you work into Google Maps, they see a list of companies in their city. The rating in the list depends on the company's rating in the service and the user's location: the closer the object is, the higher it will be in the list.

Finally, you have access to all the statistics. With Google My Business, you can easily track the behavior and activity of users on your business card using the following types of statistics, presented in the form of infographics. All of them are useful for future search engine optimization of the site and business card, as they allow you to understand the characteristics of your target audience more deeply:

◐ total number of card views for a specific period;

◐ the ratio of branded and professional industry-related queries that users used to search for your company;

◐ services through which your company was found (general search and search on Google Maps);

◐ Various user actions, for example: viewing photos (with a demonstration of viewing dynamics compared to your competitors), going to a website, getting directions, and making calls via a card;

◐ location and total number of users who used the route planning function to your company;

◐ number of phone calls over a certain period of time with identification of the most active days of the week and time of day;

◐ information about the time when the institution is visited by the largest number of customers, which is available to users in the form of an interactive diagram;

◐ graphs showing the number of photos published over a certain period of time.

Are you interested in conducting SEO optimization of your site and want to bring it to the top positions of search engine results? The IT company Golden Web will help you with this! We provide a wide range of services for promoting sites, including using the Google Business service, and will easily increase the attractiveness of your company in accordance with all search algorithms. Development and promotion of Golden Web sites - the choice of the best and most successful!