If you’re running a business, chances are you want people in your local area to know about it.

After all, what’s the point of having a great product or service if nobody in your target market knows about it? That’s where local SEO comes in. Local SEO is all about optimizing your online presence to make it easier for people in your area to find you. Here’s a quick overview of how it works and why it’s so important.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is the process of optimizing your online presence—including your website, directory listings, and social media profiles—to make it easier for people in your target market to find you when they’re searching for the products or services you offer.

It’s important to note that, while local SEO is similar to traditional SEO (search engine optimization), there are some key differences.

• Traditional SEO focuses on optimizing your website for generic keywords that are relevant to your business as a whole.
• Local SEO, on the other hand, focuses on keywords that are specifically related to your location. For example, if you’re a restaurant in Los Angeles, a traditional SEO approach would focus on optimizing your site for keywords like “food,” “restaurant,” and “Los Angeles.” A local SEO approach would focus on keywords like “restaurants in Los Angeles” and “Los Angeles restaurants.”

How Does Local SEO Work?

There are a few different ways to go about optimizing your site for local search. One of the most important is to claimed and optimize your Google My Business listing. This is the listing that appears when people do a search for businesses like yours in Google Maps or Google Search. When claiming and optimized correctly, your GMB listing can help you show up higher in search results, which gives you a better chance of getting found by potential customers.

Another important part of local SEO is making sure that your website is optimized for mobile devices. More and more people are using their phones and tablets to do searches these days, so it’s imperative that your site looks good and functions well on smaller screens. In addition, it’s also important to ensure that your website loads quickly; according to Google, 53% of mobile searchers will abandon a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

Finally, one of the best things you can do to improve your local SEO is to generate positive online reviews—and plenty of them.

Studies have shown that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family members. What’s more, 68% of consumers say that positive reviews make them more likely to use a business. Given those numbers, it’s clear that reviews can have a major impact on whether or not people choose to do business with you—so if you don’t have any reviews yet (or if you have mostly negative ones), now is the time to start working on changing that!

So again we address the question, “Why Does Local SEO Matter?”

As the owner or marketing director of a business, it’s important to understand how local SEO works and why it matters. By taking the time to optimize your online presence for local search, you can drastically increase your chances of being found by potential customers who are right in your backyard—and that can translate into more leads, more sales, and more growth for your business. So what are you waiting for? Get started –> Hire your SEO TEAM TODAY!