SEO is one of those terms that might easily switch you off if you run a small local business, and it’s easy to understand why. It’s one of those techy acronyms that sound like they are full of jargon, spouted by tech companies that are willing to provide you with miracles in order to make your business a success on the internet — for a hefty price.
In reality though, SEO is actually one of those tech terms that it pays to pay attention to – and yes, that applies even if you’ve got a business that doesn’t operate on a large scale national basis. It stands for Search Engine Optimisation and in its simplest form it’s all about making a website appear higher up on a search engine result for a certain term.
This is important for any business, but it’s something that’s often overlooked by smaller companies that are only operating out of one section of the country. Conversely, its these exact companies that can actually benefit most from a good SEO campaign that can drive highly relevant traffic to their site.
Local SEO is a section of the overall SEO method which specialises in putting exactly those sorts of businesses higher up on results. That way, more people visit the website, but it goes beyond that. More people are simply aware of your business. Google is clever enough to recognise when a user is searching for something locally and will bring up an entirely different style of results which almost always includes a large map of the area searched for together with the details of all businesses in the area.
Being aware of this sort of service and how people use it can give you a huge advantage over the competition, from a local perspective. Many businesses have neglected the internet and are still putting money into business directories in paper form that are quickly dying out, especially amongst the younger generation that wouldn’t even considering looking in the Yellow Pages before searching online.
If the idea of local SEO interests you and you’ve already got a website but feel it’s not really doing anything for your company, I strongly suggest you do some of your own research into how it can help and find a good seo agency to use, because the subject is just too big to cover well in one short blog post. Just don’t overlook local SEO – it’s not just another worthless tech term.