Answers to 4 Frequently Asked Questions About Seo: Local Seo for Businesses in Colombo
Summary of content
- What is local SEO and how is it different to regular SEO?
- Local SEO – How does it work?
- Why do websites need organic visitors from local SEO
- How do you force Google to display business results?
- What types of businesses can use local SEO?
- How do you compete in cities and towns outside of your physical location?
- Google My Business pages
- How can the Digital Content Kings SEO agency in Colombo help your business?
What is local SEO and how is it different from regular website SEO?
When we mention SEO, most of the times it is associated with Organic SEO. Although, SEO is an evolving and imperative practice which has to be employed by webmasters to survive the online world, we fail to understand that Local SEO also forms one of the important aspects of SEO.
Why do websites need organic visitors from local SEO?
Bloggers, Internet marketers, affiliate marketers, internet-based business and some brick and mortar business employ Organic SEO to work towards improving their rankings and increasing their traffic. Some examples of keywords that could be used in organic SEO campaigns include ‘beauty tips’, ‘solar panel installation procedure’ etc. Only those websites rank in the organic results which have trusted SEO content and can provide value to the users.
Local SEO – How does it work?
Now, what if you are a small insurance contractor in Colombo, how will you make your way up there? How would you let your users know about your existence? Here’s when Local SEO comes into the picture.
These results basically show the insurance contractors that are relevant to the users and present in Colombo. The local results are usually labelled with customer ratings, reviews and other information about the business including hours of operation, directions, phone number, address etc. in other words, the search engines display the results based on geographically related keywords used in the search query. Therefore, in local SEO, search engines rank and favor those websites which have relevant and trusted locations. So the key difference between local SEO and regular website SEO is that you need to optimize both your website and your Google My Business profile page to compete in local SEO.
Local SEO is simply the practice of building reliability and relevant signals around specific locations. Continuing the above example, when the user searches insurance contractor in Colombo, the following result would come up:
How do you force Google to display business results?
You may find that your business doesn’t appear for relevant searches in your area. To maximize how often your customers see your business in local search results, complete the following tasks in Google My Business. Providing and updating business information in Google My Business can help your business’s local ranking on Google and enhance your presence in Search and Maps.
What Types of Businesses Can Use Local SEO?
Click here to read Google’s full guidelines for listing your business on Google. Between 2015 and 2017, Google research showed that the local searches without the “near me” phrase skyrocketed by 150 percent. With the user’s location information, Google (and local search services) improved at providing local results for user search terms. Businesses that already had a local SEO plan in place easily benefitted from these improvements. It should be noted that local SEO is not appropriate for 100% e-commerce businesses. That’s because there is no physical location for customers to visit the store.
How do you compete in cities and towns outside of your physical location?
If I’m searching for coffee in the upper west side of Colombo, then it doesn’t help me to see businesses that are really far away. Google knows this and that’s why the location of the person searching versus the actual location of the business is a big factor in local SEO. Benefits of SEO marketing agency for local businesses include: better web presence in your local niche market, higher search engine rankings, more calls from potential customers, more people finding your store and coming buy to make purchases.
Google my business pages
And certainly if you add more Google My Business pages, you can expand your footprint a little more, but there is still that location factor, so you can only do so much with that. On the other hand, there’s a lot you can do on the localized organic side of things to expand your footprint. for example: try to expand your net on the Google Map and try to expand your net on the localized organic results, rather than trying to cover the map with Google My Business pages. So if you emphasize the organic visibility, you can compete better in cities and towns outside of your physical location.
How can the Digital Content Kings SEO agency in Colombo help your business?
Traditional marketing agencies and web development agencies in Colombo may understand the basics of how to build a website but our research has shown that 80% of Colombo’s Digital marketing agencies do not understand the fundamentals of content marketing and local SEO. The key to competing in Google and other search engines is to understand how to tailor content to make it relevant for both Google and your readers.
To discuss your local SEO marketing goals with one of our marketing team email us marketing@what-media.com or head to our contact form and send your enquiry.