Local search engine optimization (SEO) may sound small in scope, but it can bring huge benefits to your business. This post takes a look at how the process works.

Website Improvement and Analysis of Competition

Successful local SEO campaigns typically have some initial steps in common: an analysis of the business’s existing website and a look at what competing businesses are doing. The website analysis seeks ways to improve the website’s performance in search engine rankings. Meanwhile, the competition analysis allows your business to figure out what your competitors are doing well so that you can emulate them.

Research of Keywords

Another vital ingredient is keyword research. SEO expert Neil Patel describes this as the process of identifying the terms the people you want to reach are searching for. The next step after that is to figure out how to make your business’s website show up in search results for those terms. These two parts of keyword research work hand in hand to attract potential customers.

Creation of Content and Link Building

Content creation is an additional part of local SEO. This involves building content that your target audience will find interesting. Put another way, it builds on the previous step by supplying content relevant to the keywords identified as priorities during the keyword-research step. The goal is to provide your target audience with content that lines up well with their searches. That will draw them to your site and make them more likely to want to do business with your company.

Finally, an oft-forgotten but still important factor in local SEO is link building. This is the process of garnering support from other websites by having them a link to your business’s content. The more authoritative the website linking to yours, the better. This part can be tricky, but the competition analysis performed at the start of the campaign can be a good starting point for ideas of which websites to target for link building.