It sounds old-fashioned by now, but many businesses work exclusively locally and have no interest whatsoever in operating supra-regionally in any form. Nevertheless, they also have to invest in SEO. Because within a region, they too are sometimes exposed to enormous competition. For them, so-called Local SEO is decisive. It has a lot in common with general SEO, but there are also differences. Here is a field report on which factors work and which do not.
Local SEO – why is it important?
Think of restaurants, shops or craftsmen. They do not have the opportunity to sell their services outside a certain radius. Nevertheless, the problem for them is that they also have to be found on the web somehow. This means that for local businesses it is important to be well placed in Google. How do you achieve this?
Domain name
In the very early days of the internet, the domain name was king in SEO. A title like “kinderschuhe-kaufen.ch” was already enough to be well placed. This is no longer the case. Google has significantly devalued this factor. However, this does not apply to local SEO. If you start with a domain “jalousien-reparieren-zuerich.ch”, you will notice that this is not so insignificant. For Google, the mention of the city name strongly indicates a local business. The keywords in turn show a high relevance. In Local SEO, this is still an important factor today, if there is enough content on the page to further strengthen the reference.
User signals
Try to keep your users on the page for a long time. The Barber Shop in Zurich, for example, displays numerous images to achieve this. While customers are looking at the photos and learning about the beard creations available in the shop, Google registers the length of stay. The higher it is, the better – the search engine assumes.
Links
Regional customers? Then it is also regional links that work best. After all, what would be more unnatural if the heating engineer from Munich was linked by the New York Times? Doubts would certainly arise. Therefore, for regional businesses, links that Google knows are from the same region are better.
Entries in business portals
Who still registers in the Yellow Pages today? Well, local businesses do. Because they know that there are still enough senior citizens who use them. Such entries are then also good for Google. Especially if they are paid portals. Then the probability is much higher that it’s about a serious business and not a shop that in reality is just a front for a rip-off on the internet.