What is the Local SEO?

If you have a local business and you are looking to attract local customers, you have come to the right article! In this article, we try to explain you what is the “Local SEO” and what are the challenges you may encounter to achieve that.

Let us start from the definition of the local SEO before we go through the steps of how to optimize our website for that. We suggest you read “What is SEO” article before continuing this article.

What does the Local SEO mean?

The Local SEO would help you to introduce your business to your local customers. It means that if your business is located in Dubai Marina, customers from this area can find you easily with a simple search! By applying this method, you can find the customers who are very close to your location and boost your chance of selling products to them.

What is the different between Local SEO and SEO?

Let us give you an example for that. If you search for “the best restaurants”, you can see normal results, however if you search for “the best restaurants in Dubai” you can find only local results for that.

The purpose of users is an important subject which Google is working on that recently. In this case; Google understands the intent of the user which is about the restaurants located in Dubai.

By displaying only Dubai’s restaurants, Google tries to enhance the user experience.

Local SEO means:

1. An opportunity to attract customers who are close to our business location
2. A “Better introduction” and “Detailed Information” about your business

Now that you found out the meaning of the local SEO, you may ask whether the local SEO is important for ALL websites or not?

The answer is NO! you will realize it in next part.

Why the “Local SEO” has become so important recently?

And why is it becoming more important every day?

Statistics show that 46% of the searchers are related to a specific location! Users are now more likely to search for something in an area (Like Restaurants in Dubai Mall). The good news is that you don’t need to compete with all the websites in the world for “Local SEO”. You have a better chance to succeed because you are competing with a group of local businesses. So, you can flourish with a good strategy in this case.

Have you ever thought that Where will the results of Local SEO be displayed?

Google shows 3 local results in a separate section. This is called “Local Pack 3”. You can see an example below:

As you can see, this table has a different appearance and is including these details:

• The website score (By users’ vote)
• Exact location of the website or business
• Working hours detail
• User’s review about the websites (That would be chosen randomly based on the keywords users have searched for)

As we mentioned, the appearance of this section is different, and they have a better click-rate than the others. It means that if you can place your website there, you will have a great chance to get more visitors.

Keep in mind that this table would be displayed only if the search keywords are local based, similar to below example:

How we can optimize our website for the Local SEO? (For UAE and Dubai Market)

We talked about the Local SEO and now it is time to talk about how to apply that for your website.

Do NOT forget your website’s standards and coding

Some people think that to optimize a website for Local SEO, Local SEO is enough!!! What does it mean? It means that they don’t consider that website standardization and adequate coding is needed for any kinds of SEO. Without that, you are wasting your time on optimizing your website.

If you want to find out your website’s issues and problems in deep, you better read “Technical SEO” article.

1- On-Page SEO Optimization is a Required Background for the “Local SEO”

Whatever you do in your website, is more important than what you do out of it! That’s why we always insist on on-page SEO before trying to optimise for Local SEO.

Choosing right keywords for each page is one of the most important factors for on-page SEO. By reading “Investigate for Keywords” article, you can crack this step.

2- The Local Directories are the best solution for the Local SEO

There are some websites in UAE that gather information of all local businesses in a page. As an example, “Zomato” has information of all restaurants and cafes of the UAE and Dubai, and Google knows it. By placing your website in these kinds of directories, you can be seen beside your competitors and if you are good enough, you can have a better result.

There are some other examples of directories in UAE such as “Google My Business”, “Yellow Pages”, “Entertainer” and so on.

3- Ask your satisfied customers to leave a comment or review for you

There is an unwritten rule in the online marketing that says: If someone talks about a website, others will be encouraged to do so! It means that if you ask your customers to talk about your business in medias, it will result 2 advantages for you:

• Social singles are effective on SEO indirectly!
• Other users will be encouraged to talk about you by seeing that.

4- Optimize your website Google Map

You may have seen that sometimes Google shows “Google Map” results in the “rich snippet” for you. As much as the information in this place is more in details, users will trust you more! “Contact Page” in Company Web Design is the best place for add contact information and sync data with Google Map.

All the things we have talked about were only a small piece of the “Local SEO”. But we assure you that if you listen and do what we have discussed here, you can improve your business for the local customers significantly.