Written by Amir Waheed. ✅ Edited and published by Bonny Isselt.
Many local business owners feel there is no need to invest their time and money to boost their online presence, especially when pitting against giants like Amazon, Flipkart, Walmart, and more. This can be true when it comes to important organic listings. However, local listings have a different story to tell.
Whether you run a brick-and-mortar store or sell products online in a specific geographic area, local SEO offers you an opportunity to connect with online audiences in a specific neighborhood, locality, city, or town.
In this article, you will learn about the importance of local SEO in Toronto for service-based businesses in the locality, along with its benefits.
Table of Contents
Local SEO: the Best Strategy for Service-Based Businesses
Location-based SEO is really the best strategy for businesses selling services and products for the following reasons:
- Improved Online Visibility:
Local SEO activity like link-building and citation helps you optimize your visibility online. This way, your business can be found more easily by new customers.
- Driving More Foot Traffic:
Significant visibility on a local level can help you ve more foot traffic to the physical location of your business, thus helping you boost your brick-and-mortar store’s sales.
- Boosting Sales of Localised Products:
After the COVID-19 crisis, many customers now prefer to support local businesses and smaller brands. They even purchase their products, helping them boost their sales.
With local SEO, you can earn such new business opportunities and capitalize on them, leading to more sales and traffic.
- Targeted Online Traffic:
By optimizing your site for localized search, you can drive the traffic you target to your website. This can result in more leads, sign-ups, subscriptions, and sales.
- Improved Number of Calls:
Optimizing Google Business Profiles (previously Google My Business) can help you enhance the visibility of your business on Google Maps. This will bring in more calls and more foot traffic to your physical location.
- Thought Leadership:
With the help of content marketing, you can establish a position of thought leadership and get yourself seen as a niche or subject expert.
- Boosted Trust and Credibility:
Local SEO can also help you build a reputation, which is extremely important for your business.
- Optimized Sales and Conversion Rates:
Consumers usually analyze online reviews and testimonials to check the quality of the products and services offered by online businesses. Positive reviews and testimonials can increase sales and significantly optimize conversion rates.
- Competitive Advantage:
With local SEO, you can gain a certain advantage over other businesses in your niche. It helps you study the tactics of your rivals and the ones working well for them. This way, you can integrate the tactics aligning with your business goals and check whether they work well for your needs.
Why Local SEO is Essential for Service-Based Businesses?
Imagine you are a car mechanic specializing in exotic vehicles, running a garage in Mississauga. Suddenly, a local Lamborghini Gallardo owner experiences issues with his vehicle, such as a starting problem or battery issue. The owner will be your ideal customer.
However, the local search results are dominated by names that are bigger and more prominent than yours on directory sites, top-10 lists, blogs, and articles. This becomes an uphill task to compete and tough for the Lamborghini owner to find their way to your workshop.
On the other hand, if you leverage local SEO, you will show up at the top of the SERPs and local results, along with important information, such as working hours(including opening and closing time), phone number, location, etc. The car owner will be able to see you nearby, get the details and fix an appointment to get their vehicle repaired.
Benefits of Running Local SEO for Service-Based Businesses
- Improved Online Visibility:
Performing local SEO enhances your visibility in local search results. Apart from that, it also allows you to build improved online visibility on an overall basis. The most prominent example of this is citation-building. It is considered to be frequently used for local SEO.
In citation-building, you mention the name of your business, its physical location, and phone number through social media profiles, directory listings, and online testimonial platforms.
Citation-building helps users find businesses relevant to their requirements as easily as possible if you do it in many different places.
- Capitalizing Localized Support:
As mentioned above, recent years have witnessed a rise in support for local goods, notifying a significant change in consumer habits. Consumers are increasingly prioritizing local businesses while making purchase-related decisions.
According to research, consumers prefer to think smaller and choose local independent businesses rather than established and big brand names they used to go for previously.
| Did You Know? 56% of consumers are purposefully going for local stores and seeking products that are locally sourced. |
A Prominent Case Study Where Local SEO Drove More Sales and Profits
Various local businesses have effectively implemented local SEO strategies that have led to a significant increase in sales and conversion rates. Given below is a prominent case study that highlights these efforts:
- Lawnsavers:
A lawncare service based in Ontario, Canada, Lawnsavers undertook a local SEO campaign to gain leads from different cities around its primary location. By optimizing their offerings for local visibility and applying effective reputation management strategies online, they were able to boost lead generation during their peak season.
This led to a significant increase in both conversions and inquiries during their peak times. It showcases the impact of localized SEO that kept Lawnsavers at the forefront of the competition in the market.
Conclusion
Local SEO is definitely becoming a big life changer for various local businesses. Blended with the support for locally sourced products, it can definitely help drive more sales and conversions compared to bigger, established businesses selling outsourced products and services.
The above-mentioned benefits and reasons showcase the power of local SEO in boosting online visibility, driving targeted foot traffic, and many other aspects that are helpful for local businesses to stay ahead of the competition.
Optimizing your local business profiles, targeting local keywords, managing your online reputation, and optimizing your content will help you generate leads and put your business ahead of the competition.
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