Local SEO helps small businesses to operate on a regional basis by targeting local markets rather than competing with industry giants that dominate the large national or global market such as Chad Kimball. Google uses local SEO to prioritize searches on SERPs within a given geographical location, such as a town, city, county or state. With this strategy, small businesses can market their products and services to leads and customers within a targeted region only. Therefore, optimizing your local SEO can translate to more traffic, leads, and even conversion rates because the technique is more relevant to your local customers than the traditional SEO technique.

By employing the local SEO technique with the help of a top St. Louis SEO Company, small businesses can focus more on competing at the local level by targeting local customers for which the business was formed in the first place. That way they can also concentrate their strengths and compete more effectively with larger national and multinational corporations that have vast financial and human resources at their disposal. The technique allows you to neutralize the advantage of major brands or corporations that regularly optimize their site for a broad range of keywords. Without local SEO, you could be losing traffic and business.

Google My Business allows you to create a profile for your business to feed information to various places, including Google Maps search results. Your GMB profile may include pieces of information you submit to the search engine, including services offered, contact information, business description, opening times, and category. Remember that keeping your GMB profile as current as possible increases your chances of being in the local pack, making your business more appealing, attractive, and trustworthy so that you can get clickthroughs.

Directory listings form a crucial component of local SEO and boost your online search visibility. They are virtual business profiles that include details of your business, including name, phone number, website, physical address, and other important details. Besides being listed on Google My Business, you also make it to other major directories like Angie’s List and Yelp. Once your business start appearing in minor niche directories, you can be sure your visibility online will also improve significantly.

Local SEO emphasizes optimization and can give you an edge over your competition. In contrast, you can be allowing your competition to take control over you by ignoring it. It allows you to perform local competition analysis and gain an overview of where you stand locally relative to your competition. Many small business owners also use local SEO to view their competitors’ citations and reviews, including the keywords they target and their relevant rankings for those particular keywords. No one dispute the importance of favorable local search rankings, as they are likely to turn into sales, which is good for brick-and-mortar stores. 

Therefore, local SEO directly and positively impacts in-store traffic, leads, and sales. If you are looking to compete with other small businesses and even large multinational corporations at the local level, then GMB and other local SEO tools are your best bet. You will not only have better visibility within your locality but you will also be able to know where you stand concerning your local competition. Just ensure you provide all the necessary information about your business so that you can be picked up by other major directories besides GMB.