Local SEO versus traditional marketing. If it’s got to be one or the other, you’d be mad to choose traditional marketing.
The reason is three-fold – Relevance, Reach, Return. If you do anything today, read our reasoning for choosing local SEO. It could mean the difference between wasting thousands and winning thousands.
Relevancy
As a business owner, you’ll know all about the importance of being where your customers are. Being in the right place at the right time wins business, and this is the fundamental advantage local SEO has over traditional marketing.
Local SEO puts your business in front of your customer when they want to see it, by delivering your result to them based on a query they’ve type into Google. In other words, you show up only when you are relevant.
Compare this to traditional marketing, which isn’t strategically delivered at a point in your customer’s journey, and the advantage is obvious – local SEO makes your business more relevant more of the time. It puts you right in front of people who are genuinely interested in what you do, which leads to more conversions.
Reach
Google has greater reach than any other medium. And we mean any. Here’s how many searches they handled in 2016 [Search Engine Land]:
- Searches per second: 63,000
- Searches per minute: 3.8 million
- Searches per hour: 228 million
- Searches per day: 5.5 billion
- Searches per month: 167 billion
- Searches per year: 2 trillion
The UK accounts for roughly 10% of this. According to Google, nearly 1/3 of all mobile searches are related to location. This means tens of millions of people use Google to find a business in their area every single day.
Return
Local SEO is not paid search. There’s no pay-per-click involved — at least, not unless you want to go down that route.
If you use an SEO company to setup and manage your listing, you won’t pay more than a few hundred pounds a month. If done right, you could generate business worth thousands of pounds, so it’s well worth the expense.
If you want to do it yourself, claiming your Google My Business listing is free and managing your listing is too. Once you’re on there, you will have the opportunity to show up in Google search in the dedicated business listings, which look like this:
Businesses who show up at the top of these listings have complete business information. They also have reviews, accurate hours, and photos. If you want to target multiple locations, you need to build what we SEO folk call silos for each location.
Something to keep in mind is that a bad listing won’t rank well, which is why savvy businessowners outsource the setup and optimisation to a company like us. We specialise in this stuff to maximise your results. Get in touch for a chat.
