Local businesses have to fight a lot to keep their relevance. These days, the competition is worse, especially as the world of marketing has seen a huge shift online. How can small or medium businesses survive the relentless competition brought on by big brands with deeply lined pockets?

In reality, though, there are a lot of steps that a small business with local roots and a customer base can take to survive and thrive. While paid marketing is never going away, you can drive much customer engagement and conversion organically. That is where SEO comes in.

In this blog, we’ll explore SEO and discuss why you might benefit if you outsource your local SEO in 2024.

Why is SEO Important for a Business?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process that makes your website more noticeable to search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. For any business, big or small, this matters a lot because most people these days first search online when they need something.

The goal of any SEO strategy is to make your business reach the top of search results. Why? Because most people don’t bother to go to the second page of a search result. So the higher you rank in a search, the higher your chances of being seen by prospective customers.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO deals with local searches, aka any search with a location modifier. With smartphones becoming the preferred medium for search, search engines (especially Google) have tried to show local and relevant results front and foremost.

Just like traditional SEO. local SEO also deals with things like on and off-page optimisation, link-building, keyword strategy and more. The only difference here is that Local SEO focuses on ranking you higher in your local search terms.

In fact, local SEO also has a few unique ranking factors:

• Location of the searcher
• NAP (Name, Address, Phone) citations
• Google My Business (GMB) profile and the keywords used in it
• Online reviews (Ratings, activity, engagement, keywords)
• Check-ins at the physical location of your business
• Social media shares
• Google Maps star rating

Why Should I Outsource My Local SEO?

If you are a local business, you might have just set up your online presence, or are yet to. In this digital world, Google rules the roost when it comes to search engines – both for local searches and online reviews.

In a study conducted by MOZ in 2020, they found out a few startling facts:

• Local searches amounted to almost half of Google’s 2 trillion searches that year.
• Proximity, aka physical distance, ranks third among Googe’s local ranking factors.
• 88% of the digital marketers interviewed agreed that there is a close correlation between organic and local ranking.

Source: MOZ

Now that you have a better idea about the importance of local SEO in your digital marketing strategy, let us now discuss why you should outsource it for the best results.

1. Increase Reach and Thereby Sales

A local SEO outsourcing agency can implement the best SEO practices to boost your business’s visibility online. As you reach more potential customers, you’ll also encounter more conversions as they engage more with you.

Local SEO also plays an important role in increasing the physical footfall in your store, as it is targeted to be found by people searching for your business nearby.

2. Cost Effective Expertise

Most small to medium businesses outsource local SEO expertise to save costs. While every business should have at least one SEO expert in their in-house team, not everyone can afford one. And even if they do, chances are they are a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to SEO (which is good to have for other reasons).

This is where outsourcing helps in many ways, especially in keeping expenditures in check. Outsourcing your local SEO needs can prove cheaper to you in the long run, as you don’t have to hire full-time employees and invest in their training. Similarly, you get access to a pool of experts, professional SEO tools and software, without the added cost of multiple subscriptions and salaries.

3. Time and Core Competency Management

If you’re just getting started or have started online marketing recently, chances are you have already built a successful business through traditional methods. In this case, your core competencies lie elsewhere, depending on the type of business you own.

Local SEO outsourcing can help free up your and your team’s time to focus and improve on what they already know – your core business operations. So while you focus on managing the core areas of business that are its lifeblood, outsourced SEO experts from India can focus on what they are good at.

Saving you both time and effort.

4. Flexibility and Adaptability

Another added benefit of outsourcing local SEO is its immense potential for flexibility and customizability. Local SEO experts from Seotal can adapt to the specific needs of your business. For example, suppose you already have SEO professionals on your team. In that case, outsourced SEO expertise might help you into the nitty-gritty of Local SEO strategy. In contrast, your in-house SEO team manages and acts as a point of contact for your overall SEO efforts.

This translates into costs too. A customized strategy from local SEO experts based in India can focus only on the areas you need a lot of work on, saving you significant costs. Similarly, SEO outsourcing agencies can adapt their campaigns based on your needs and budget.

5. Risk-Mitigation and Real-Time Tracking

While Google is known to reward good SEO practices, a single mistake can cost you your hard-earned rank in search results. Google updates its guidelines regularly, and not following them can lead to severe penalties.

Outsourcing Local SEO, hence, can be a smart move to prevent you fall afoul of Google’s dynamic policies. The experts at Seotal have to keep abreast of all the latest changes in these guidelines as it is their bread and butter, doing away with any risk of being removed from the SERPs due to multiple violations, however unintended.

SEO outsourcing partners also engage in heavily monitoring your performance, so that they can adapt to changes in search algorithms and customer preferences.

Local SEO the Right Way in 2024

At its heart, Local SEO is just anticipating the customers’ needs and making it easy for them to find what they need. As a business owner, these sentiments should be easy for you to understand.

There are a lot of SEO outsourcing companies out there and choosing one among them can be a tedious task. Fortunately, we have compiled a list of key components of a good local SEO strategy you can refer to while selecting your outsourcing partner.

The Map Pack

Also known as “The Local Pack”, the map pack refers to a collection of the top 3 businesses for a local search with the map of their locations pulled from Google Maps. Being featured on The Map Pack should be the goal of any business, as it is literally at the top of the search results.

When selecting your Local SEO outsourcing partner, ask them how they plan to get you on The Map Pack.

Pro Tip: Ensuring NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistency and citations is the only right answer here.

Local Organic Searches and Keywords

While The Map Pack’s positioning makes it extremely important for local SEO, it is far from the only requirement. Just below The Map Pack, organic SERP results can be found, necessitating that your Local SEO outsourcing partner have a strategy to rank in organic searches, too.

This, as you might already know, involves keywords. Keywords are the lifeblood of SEO. For a good local SEO keyword strategy, ideally, your SEO outsourcing partner should find and include relevant keywords and curate content around them. Unlike blogs, though, website optimization by including local keywords is usually a one-time process.

GMB Consistency

The Local Search Ranking Factors Study by MOZ found out that the Google My Business profile is the most important factor for ranking in the Map Pack. Wasn’t it NAP? Yes, it is. Let us explain.

Your Google Business profile is how the search engine verifies you are who you claim to be while listing every other bit of relevant information about your business. If there is any place to be thoroughly consistent and consistently thorough – this is it.

NAP citations refer to your listings with name, address, and phone number) in other websites or online directories. So if your NAPs in a random website don’t match the NAPs in your Google Business profile, Google loses confidence in you and your map pack and organic rankings fall as a result.

Pro Tip: Ask your Local SEO outsourcing partner to embed your Google Maps location in the About Us section of your website.

Reviews and Social Media

Another essential ranking signal for local searches is reviews. Your Google business profile already provides an option for customers to leave reviews. A good SEO outsourcing partner will know this and their strategy will lean heavily on gathering reviews.

This process usually involves generating review links and sending them to customers by email. It’s also important to reply to every review, both positive and negative—this shows Google and potential customers that you care.

Local SEO in social media marketing is straightforward – keywords in the right places. This brings you organic traffic. You can also leverage social media to find out what’s happening in and around your community.

Being active in your local community will generate plenty of opportunities to earn backlinks to your website in various ways, such as:

• Promoting local events
• Content creation in partnership with local creators
• Local PR opportunities.

Why Choose Seotal For Outsourcing Your Local SEO

SEO optimization, both on and off-page, is a never-ending process of improving a business’s performance, just like life itself. Similarly, it can be confusing at times and daunting at others.

Thankfully, we at Seotal are here to help you on this journey. The domain of SEO is constantly evolving, and so are we, with our experts leveraging every trick in and outside the book to get results. From optimizing Local SEO in the ways discussed in this blog to accounting for mobile and voice search, we do it all – so you don’t have to.

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