3 Reasons Local SEO Benefits Small Businesses

Local SEO is a relatively new way for website to optimize their website for what is referred to as local searches. This type of search engine optimization has several benefits that businesses can enjoy regardless of their size, but it also has a few that are specific to small businesses. The reduced costs associated with it, the lack of competitors and potential to surpass even global business in search engine results are just a few of the ways that local search engine optimization makes itself attractive to smaller businesses.

To understand how these benefits work with this type of search engine optimization, it’s important to understand what a local search is.

The best way to do this is to start with a familiar type of search: the global search. When a user submits a query into this type of search, the search engine queries all possible results that are applicable. This means that so long as the target phrase applies to the submitted search, websites from all over the world will be included in the result of the search.

For an idea of what a local search is, consider if the global search was taken and then restricted to some measure of distance from a location. Instead of being served results from places that a user would not travel, users can find local answers to their problems. This allows every type of business from plumbing repairs to local restaurant establishments to have the potential to show up in a highly relevant and frequently clicked upon position in a result.

This means that local searches generally have less costs associated with optimizing for them. Instead of being forced to worry about submitting to large and established global directories for back links, procuring links from multiple websites with high link authority and other expensive practices associated with off-site SEO, the amount of off-site optimization that has to be done to rank highly is kept to a minimum.

Furthermore, the aforementioned off-site SEO would be more effective when tailored for local searches than it would be in global SEO. This results in the lack of need to develop several hundred of these types of back links as it would be to rank highly in global searches.

The next benefit small businesses will find with local searches over global searches is the fact that there is less applicable competition in local searches. While the exact amount of competition varies depending upon the region where the business plans to do its local search engine optimization, it will almost always be less than it would with global searches. It will also generally exclude competition that would be nearly impossible to beat, such as massive corporations that have worked on their search optimization for years with nearly limitless funds.

The last advantage that local SEO holds that is specific to small businesses is the ability to surpass the amount of business global results can bring a business. When a user is searching for something specifically in their area, they are looking for one of two things: information from a local specialist or a purchasable item in that region. For small businesses, this means that the type of users utilizing local searches are also the type that are more likely to stick around and inquire for more information. This results in a higher conversion rate and lower amount of users backing out to their results page after viewing a web page listed as a global search result.

All of these benefits allow for small businesses to become established in an area where they will most likely see enough traffic to produce business from their online efforts. which allows them to readily be on their way to developing an online presence as large as they require. That means it makes sense that small businesses should try investing in local search engine optimization before trying to tackle the global market.