A local SEO company is often better than its distant peers at helping clients to get their search engine optimization strategies off the ground. A big part of the reason for this is because a local SEO company is more likely to have available resources for link-building within a localized online community. And local link-building is often a recommended starting point for broader SEO strategies, including those that are international in scope.
Google’s PageRank algorithm gives a great deal of weight to local mentions or “citations.”
The information contained on your own website – including company name, proprietor, address, phone number, and the site’s URL – may show up in a variety of contexts elsewhere on the web. When they do, it helps to demonstrate the existing popularity of your business, as well its association with relevant keywords that appear on the third-party webpages.
A well-established local SEO company will help its clients to identify the best keywords. But more importantly, it may also help to establish partnerships with local businesses and influential consumers. This can then lead to those partners creating citations for the client’s business, complete with keywords that fit into a defined optimization strategy.
When citations tend to come from the same geographic area, they give Google additional information about the nature of your business and the consumers it serves. This in turn helps the algorithm to understand that your website will be highly relevant to people searching for the same topics, in the same area. But this isn’t to say that by working on this strategy with a local SEO company, you are limiting yourself to local visibility over the long term.
It should come as no surprise that it’s easier to make an impression within a local community, as opposed to a national or international one. Even the most ubiquitous franchise restaurants needed to start by making a name for themselves in the area of their first location. Only afterwards were they able to set their sights on cornering the market in the United States and beyond.
Your local SEO company should recognize that online marketing follows the same basic pattern. It usually doesn’t matter what product or service your business offers. It usually doesn’t matter whether its operations are primarily online. In most cases, there are still opportunities to build a local following first, before branching off into farther-reaching operations, with farther-reaching marketing.
In the meantime, it is probably worthwhile to look for local vendors and clients. And where appropriate, it may be helpful to trade or solicit citations on local review pages, or to mention one another in on-site blogs and in social media accounts. It doesn’t matter if this sort of local outreach doesn’t capture the full ambition of you SEO strategy. It is the essential building block of something greater.
Enter your email address and we'll send you a video guide.
GET YOUR FREE COPY NOW
