Introduction to Local SEO
In the age of the internet, it is nearly impossible to shy away from an online store. With an online presence, you can reach out to a wide audience and effortlessly scale your sales, reputation and bottom line. Without, you might as well not exist.
Whether it’s chain stores with a nationwide footprint or local retailers, eCommerce is booming like never before. In 2020, global retail eCommerce sales amounted to 4.28 trillion US dollars, and online retail revenues are set to grow to 5.4 trillion US dollars in 2022.
The chart below from eMarketer's 2021 global e-commerce report paints an accurate picture of eCommerce growth last year, region-wise.
What is Local SEO?
In a highly competitive world (both online and offline), this eCommerce growth is primarily founded on focussed efforts to achieve digital visibility. Whether you’re an online-based service-area business or a brick-and-mortar outfit with an eCommerce store, a large part of these efforts involves reaching out to your customer base through increased search visibility.
According to the Bright Local ‘Local Consumer Review Survey 2020', 93% of consumers found local businesses through the internet in the last year, with 34% accounting for daily search queries for services and products.
Thus, your website has to rank high enough on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) or other interfaces like Google Maps, Apple Maps and local business review platforms to attract traffic and drive conversions.
How exactly can one do this, especially if you’re a local business competing against national chains and established brands?
Enter ‘Local SEO’, or the practice of optimizing your eCommerce business’s online presence to meet customers’ location-based search queries.
Essentially, this would mean featuring on Google’s SERPs of more exact results based on the user’s location or a location-specific keyword entered.
From claiming a business listing and managing online ratings and reviews to location-specific social media engagement and content optimization, Local SEO covers a whole gamut of things to appear prominently in local search results, grab eyeballs and record transactions. The result: satisfied and returning customers who can drive growth for your eCommerce business.
In this article, we will look at a few methods you can adopt for a comprehensive Local SEO strategy.
Ways to implement Local SEO for eCommerce
Now that we have an overview of Local SEO’s role in an eCommerce business’s success, let’s look at the factors of this strategy that can drive visibility and SERP ranking and how you can leverage them.
There are three major aspects of local search that form the core of the search engine’s local algorithms governing Google’s local packs, local finders, Google maps, and other related interfaces:
Relevance
With relevance, the algorithm is essentially scoping if your business sells or offers what the customer is searching for. Google showcases the most relevant results by matching the search intent against the content or information in websites and business profiles.
To ensure relevance, ensure your Google My Business profile is complete and optimized with relevant keywords. Your website’s on-page SEO should also be targeted.
Post regularly about localized and relevant services, and ensure your information is not too complicated. Google may also mine signals of relevance from sentiment in reviews and the text of Google Posts.
Proximity
Proximity refers to the nearness of the business to the customer searching for a specific service or product.
In other words, to place you higher up in SERPs, Google considers if your business is located close enough to the searcher’s location based on the computer’s zip code or the more precise geocoordinates on a mobile device.
As user-to-business proximity forms the backbone of Local SEO, eCommerce businesses need to identify and constantly track the rankings they wish to achieve.
While it may be challenging to move a business’s listed address to rank in Google SERPs for specific locations, you can optimize your Google Business Profile’s components. You must also target localized keywords in your website content to fall within a more expansive radius for specific search queries.
Additional resources: How A Digital Marketing Consultant Can Help Your Biz
Prominence
The factor of prominence measures the extent to which your business stands out from the competing ones in that specific market or location related to the customer’s search query.
Here are some things that a business owner can focus on to boost this area of local SEO and enhance Google’s trust in the brand as an authoritative response to a search query:
- Improving authority and number of backlinks
- Social media activity, including mentions, follows, and reviews
- Positive reviews
- Citations or listings in business directories
To get a deeper insight into Google’s local search algorithm, you can rope in a trusted partner offering well-rounded SEO Services.
How to make those factors work for your eCommerce business
Based on these factors of the Local SEO algorithm, here are 5 things you can do to enhance your eCommerce business’s search visibility:
Creating a business profile
Businesses have to stand out in the online marketplace and be easy to find by customers. With a Google My Business account, you can keep your customers updated with unique and relevant information on your products and services, posts, updates, current offers, etc. Add photos, a website address, and contact information, and ensure these are uniform across all directory listings.
Content Geotagging based on Keywords
Content geotagging basically refers to seeding the locations (state, city or region) you are targeting in your website, business profile and other content as relevant keywords. This becomes even more important when Google doesn’t have access to the user’s location on a device and relies on the search query’s wording.
Content geotagging, based on in-depth keyword research, can also help a business’s site match for a transaction intent in users’ search queries (‘gaming laptops Florida’). Content geotagging can be effectively done to compete for keywords with lower difficulty as these are more specific and drive highly interested leads to your online store.
You can include geotagged keywords in title tags, URL tags, headers, and content to drive more conversions. While geotagging the keywords of your eCommerce site’s landing page and blog content, remember to keep it simple for the user and do not over-optimize.
Leveraging local influencers and optimizing content
It has become very important to leverage word-of-mouth marketing to stand out, and local influencers are a cost-effective way to increase your digital and search visibility.
By identifying and collaborating with local bloggers, journalists, YouTubers and Instagrammers, you can enhance your brand image and awareness in the locations you are targeting and tap into leads among their audience.
By collaborating with influencers on localized events, you can develop branded and optimized content to ramp up your local search visibility, such as blog posts. They can also help you with user-generated content that you can share on your social media and drive engagement and reviews. You can also arrange for account takeovers of your social media pages during your influencer marketing campaign.
Crafting content for the local audience
Remember, your leads may often start as a casual browser or reader of your website and social media content. So, integrate content into your eCommerce marketing strategy that will resonate with your local audience. You can generate and publish blog posts on topics connected to the local news or specific events and activities in the area.
Local SEO content is a great way to help people become familiar with your business and its offerings. For instance, you can generate interest in your brand and strike a chord by sharing details on the local causes hosted by your business.
By getting involved with local events, you can also post about them and publish full-fledged articles on the marquee community happenings. This will allow you to seed locally relevant keywords in your website content and drive lucrative traffic to the store.
Additional resource: Ideal Content Length for SEO: Everything You Need To Know
Submission to Local Directories
Submitting your business listing to local online directories—such as Google My Business, Yelp, Yahoo Places, Yellow Pages, Manta, FourSquare, etc.—is a modern-day tactic to take your Local SEO efforts that extra mile.
By placing your business under a specific service category, a local directory can help you stand out in SERPs and direct more consumers to your services. This is facilitated by the GPS that most directories use to curate lists of nearby, accessible businesses for a search query on the website.
You can share reviews, business comparisons, and other information with the local directories to guide consumers in making a better, quicker and more efficient choice. To enhance Local SEO results, vary the titles and descriptions submitted to different directories and integrate relevant keywords.
Conclusion
So, there you have it—an overview of Local SEO, its relevance to online businesses, and how you can leverage the strategy to drive search visibility, traffic, and ultimately converted leads for your eCommerce website.
As it can be a challenging task to get hands-on with every aspect of Local SEO and integrate it into your eCommerce business operations, you can consider onboarding a full-services SEO agency to keep ranking on Google SERPs.