The Importance of Local SEO to Small and Mid-sized Businesses

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of increasing the relevance and popularity of website to search engines, such as Google. Search engines use a detailed set of rules, known as an algorithm, to determine where on the search engine results page (SERP) for specific key words or phrases a website appears.

SEO involves technical and creative elements, but its overall purpose is to increase the ‘visibility’ of a website, so that it appears at the top of the SERP and, hopefully, receives more potential customers as a result. SEO is one of the most important online marketing disciplines.

If a website is oriented towards a specific, geographical location, such as Toronto, Canada, local SEO focuses on making the website more conspicuous to a provincial or regional audience. Local SEO is vital if a business, such as a restaurant or retail outlet, has a physical address that it expects customers to visit.

However, the process is equally relevant to ‘internet-only’ businesses, such as those that provide information and professional services, or sell digital products, if they wish to focus their online marketing activities on a particular locality.

Tactics for local SEO are fairly standard but, for best results, include the full name, address and telephone number of your business on every page of your website. Note, too, that local reviews – not just on Google reviews, but also on local online directories – can boost your local search ranking.