Any local business with a physical address OR primarily serves a set geographical area can benefit from taking a close look at local SEO.

So how does SEO work?

This is a topic you could spend endless hours researching and the landscape is always changing. In a nutshell, Google has a number of processes it uses to rank websites with an algorithm looking at various metrics. Each time you undertake a Google search, the search giant is not actually doing a 'live' search, but searching a stored copy of all sites that Google has discovered via web crawling. Once your site has been 'crawled', it's stored in Google's servers and an index is built. This helps your site be discovered via keyword or long tail searches. Google crawls a mind-boggling amount of data in seconds, so don't worry you won't be waiting forever for your site to be crawled - but you also need to be proactive to stand out!

What is local SEO?

There are plenty of ways you can start to rank up locally,

• Google Business listing and maps: This is a should be one of your first actions once you have your business up and running. It's  free! This is a great first step to being found locally and can link visitors to your website, products and services.

• Build a local landing page for your services and combine it with content that benefits from keyword research.

• Local search citations: In local SEO citations refers to mentions of your business name, address and phone number (also referred to as NAP) on a website that isn't your own. When you are just starting out online, you need citations to appear in local search results. Google's algorithm always tries to return the best local results for a local query. Sites are shown on their relevance or prominence and citations are a key factor in being found. Your citations help Google verify that you're actually located where your website says your located!

Would you like to know more? Reach out anytime.