Anyone who is working in the technology world has heard of “SEO”. If for some reason you haven’t, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. Essentially, there are webmasters who specialize in making a website readable and more desirable to Google and other search engines. How? Well, our job as SEO professionals is to analyze and dissect Google’s algorithm. Over the years, SEO has drastically changed and improved in order to benefit the end user more than anything.
One of the most popular trends that has came up in the past couple of years is optimizing for a locality – specifically. For example, if you had a barber shop in Seattle, WA your webmaster would do everything possible to let Google (and other search engines) know, “Hey, this is a barber shop and it’s in the heart of downtown Seattle”.
As you can imagine, this type of optimization can be extremely beneficial to those who do business locally.
To get more specific, here are 5 reasons why local SEO is mandatory in 2014.
Mobile Search
There are more and more people who have smartphones as each day passes, and one of the most advanced things that come with smartphones is the ability to turn on location tracking. Applications such as Foursquare, Facebook, and Instagram all use location tracking in order to let other users know where you are. Furthermore, if a user searches something in Google and they are in a certain location, Google will automatically search for websites and answers that are in that location.
For the sake of consistency, lets use the same example as we did in the introduction. Imagine you are in Seattle, WA on a business trip and you didn’t have time to get your hair trimmed and cut back home. You are desperately searching for a barber in Seattle, so you open up Google and type in “Barber Shop”. Google will automatically know that you are in Seattle and pick up websites for you based on that.
If this isn’t a good reason to optimize your website for local search, we don’t know what is.
More Keyword Searches
The simple fact is that more people search for “Barber Shop Seattle” than there are people who just search for “Baber Shop” but happen to be in Seattle. With that being said, if you optimize and focus your keyword and marketing planning around local keywords, you will naturally get quicker (and more useful) results.
Just think about this the next time you pull your phone out to search for something in Google. You are going to be much more inclined to let Google know your city after you search term because we think it will give us a better result.
It’s The Future
As marketers, we always want to stay ahead of the game, right? You don’t want to be the guy who is always in last place when it comes to applying information and new tactics. One mandatory reason that you want to be implementing local SEO is because everyone is going to be doing it eventually, and you want to ensure that you stay ahead of your competition.
As we all know, this business is extremely competitive, so any little thing that you have over the next guy can help you churn out a sale, or gain a new client. For example, if you offered Local SEO Services in Tacoma WA you would definitely want to target for that keyword.
Don’t believe us?