Businesses That Benefit The Most From Local SEO
There are two main types of SEO for businesses: national and local. National means ranking for your main keywords without any locational input or map listings. Local SEO means ranking your website for location-specific keywords, and/or ranking the Google My Business profile in the map pack listings. Which one you should go with depends on your business, target audience and budget.
In this blog, we will be taking a look at which type of businesses are best suited for Local SEO and why.
Hospitality Businesses
Businesses in the hospitality sector are probably the biggest winners in Local SEO. When it comes to searching for bars, restaurants, cafes etc, distance is one of the most important thing to people. These businesses will always serve a geographically targeted market. That’s why it’s so important for hospitality businesses to invest in Local SEO to ensure their business can appear high in the map packs.
Customer reviews are also very important for hospitality businesses. Reviews are shown very prominently in the search results, especially in the map pack listings. By having both a high number of reviews as well as a good overall review rating, your business will be able to establish instant credibility with searchers. Not to mention that reviews are a factor in ranking for local searches.
Tradespeople
Tradespeople are another sector of workers who can benefit from Local SEO. Think of plumbers and electricians. People searching for these kind of services are normally quite time sensitive: it’s not about who can help them, but when someone can help. Similar to hospitality, tradespeople’s customers will also be almost exclusively local.
With the likes of plumbers and electricians, people are just looking for a good person to provide the service asap. They usually aren’t interested in browsing your website and finding out a lot of information before calling – this is why a lot of tradespeople websites are quite basic, they don’t need to invest in the visuals of the website as much as other businesses do. That’s why Local SEO is so important, they need to get their business in front of people who are looking for their services on a “here and now” basis. A map pack listing with the company name and phone number is all they need.
Franchises
Franchises in any sector will have to keep Local SEO in mind if they want to rank for all their areas. Local SEO for franchise includes both map listings and landing pages.
Firstly, you need to submit a Google My Business profile for each location in your franchise. An important thing to remember here is to keep the business name the same for each profile. For example, “Nando’s Warrington” and “Nando’s Manchester” would be incorrect – they should both just be named “Nando’s” with their differing business addresses submitted. Follow the same advice if you are listing these businesses on websites such as Yelp.
Secondly, you should create a locational page for each location you serve. This doesn’t have to be a full blown landing page, you can just have a simple contact page for each location which includes that location’s specific phone number, email address, address and a link to the Google My Business profile. This helps to gain extra visibility in the search results both in the map pack as well as organic results.
Real Estate
Real estate companies will garner a massive majority of their organic traffic from Local SEO. Unlike the other sectors on the list, realtors won’t be targeting the map pack for their rankings. Instead, real estate websites will create unique landing pages for each location with descriptive content on the area.
For example, realtors won’t get much traffic from keywords like “real estate agent in Manchester” etc. But they will get traffic from keywords like “homes for sale in Manchester” etc. This is where Local SEO for real estate comes into effect. Each property listing and landing page should come with descriptive content about the local area, nearby amenities etc which will push the local rankings.
