What are local SEO services?

Local SEO services are provided by an SEO agency or SEO consultancy to improve a business’s local visibility in Google Search.

Businesses turn to providers of local SEO services to assure good strategy and maximise return on investment. Local SEO can transform a business by automating lead generation and increasing sales several times over.  

Local SEO services include the following:

• Google My Business optimisation
• Local citation building
• Keyword targeting
• Website optimisation
• Link building
• User experience analysis
• Analytics
• Website design changes
• Page creation
• Content creation
• Content marketing

Your local SEO strategy may require only a handful of these services.

The correct local SEO strategy for you depends on your website, budget, competition and what you want to achieve. If you want a slice of the pie, you can expect to spend less than if you want to dominate your entire industry.

What kinds of businesses need local SEO?

Any business that provides a service locally needs local SEO to show up on the first page of Google. It isn’t enough to have a website that mentions your location – you need to do more to beat all the other businesses in your area.

10 business types that reap the rewards of local SEO include:

• Dental practices
• Law firms
• Accountants
• Beauticians
• Veterinarians
• Tradespeople
• Estate agents
• Hotels
• Gyms
• Bars and restaurants

What are the keys to content optimization?

When Google Bots visit a web page they read the content on that page to determine what the page is about. They also quality score that content. How long is it? Is it easy to read? Is it unique? Does it have any grammatical errors?

The 10 keys to content optimization are as follows:

• Content length  
• Keyword targeting
• Keyword density
• Keyword distribution
• Media (images, videos)
• Meta data
• Internal links
• External links
• Schema mark-up
• Contextual language

What is mobile SEO?

Mobile SEO involves building and optimising a website so that it provides an optimal experience in Google’s eyes.

Google has moved the goalposts with this several times. A few years ago AMP (Mobile Accelerated Pages) was the big thing. Now, Google uses a metric called Core Web Vitals – a measurement of how fast a website loads.

Core Web Vitals includes the following metrics:

• First Contentful Paint
• Speed Index
• Largest Contentful Paint
• Time to Interactive
• Total Blocking Time
• Cumulative Layout Shift

You can check how your website scores here:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

What is local search in digital marketing?

In digital marketing, local search refers to how marketing activities can put products and services in front of customers in local search results.

These activities must result in a product or service showing up in local search results separately to business listings. This kind of search engine marketing focuses on the product or service rather than the business itself.

Examples of local search in digital marketing include:

• YouTube videos
• Google Images
• Google News (Stories)
• People Also Ask questions

Local search is most often utilised in digital marketing for promotions, offers and new product launches. Christmas and other holidays are also rife with search engine marketing because it is a proven way to increase sales.