7 Reasons to Maximise Your Local SEO in Brisbane
Local SEO in Brisbane is essential to staying ahead of your competition. Learn how your business can benefit by emphasising local SEO in your marketing.
Is local SEO a hurdle for your business? It doesn’t have to be.
When done right, optimizing your website for local searches can increase brand awareness, get more customers through your doors, and boost your profits. The best part: you don’t need a marketing degree to make it work for you.
Here are seven reasons to use local SEO in Brisbane to maximise your company’s success.
Higher Search Rankings
If your business isn’t on the first page of a search engine query for your keyword, it doesn’t matter how great your business is. Your website probably isn’t going to be seen.
Research shows that 75 percent of users don’t even scroll past the first page of their Google search results. In order to achieve the bare minimum goal of visibility, long-tail keywords are your friend.
Long-tail keywords are basically ultra-specific, niched down versions of your basic keywords. For example, for this website, a root keyword could be “SEO.” Using geotargeting, an effective long-tail keyword might be something like “SEO in Brisbane” or “local SEO Sunshine Coast.”
This eliminates a ton of competition who are likely located elsewhere (and therefore aren’t the best matches for the potential customer) but would rank higher than you on Google.
Don’t forget to use those keywords in your meta tags, too. That’s what users will see on their search page as a preview of your site, and it will seriously boost your rankings if that includes your long-tail keyword as well.
Include it as close to the beginning of your text as possible for maximum benefit.
Reaches Mobile Users
When you use your mobile phone to run a search, Google automatically does some geotargeting for you based on your location. That’s why, if you’re out of town and run a search for places to eat on your mobile, Google will ask if you’d like to use location-based services, and you’ll get results based on what’s nearby without even having to get specific in the search bar.
Over half of all searches now take place on a mobile device. If you’re going to get the exposure you need, especially with customers near enough to be interested in purchasing your product or service, you need to make sure your site is optimized accordingly.
Using a responsive design for your website isn’t optional anymore. It’s a huge factor in whether Google is going to give you a good ranking, and if your site is difficult or confusing to use on a mobile device, your potential customer is immediately going to hit the “back” button in a rush to get back to a friendlier interface.
There are other potential issues to consider as well. Take care not to use image sizes that are too large for smooth mobile viewing, and could increase loading times (another surefire way to drive your user away from your site).
And be conscious of how you format videos and other media — Flash isn’t usable on most mobile browsers. Try a different method to make sure your content is visible to most of your viewers, like HTML5 and/or JavaScript.
Maximises Pay-Per-Click Advertising
If you’re using AdWords to maximise your Google visibility, you have the power to make sure you don’t spend your marketing budget on people who have no need for your website or services.
AdWords gives you the ability to tailor your ad precisely to your target customer persona. If you’re using local SEO, that should absolutely include location.
If you own a sandwich shop in Melbourne, there’s no reason you should be paying for someone in Queensland to see your advertisement.
PPC advertising can also optimize your keywords in a clever way. Mobile searches are the exception to the long-tail keyword rule, and shorter words and phrases are often more effective on mobile searches (like “SEO” instead of “SEO in Brisbane”).
You can categorize which keywords you use in your campaign based on device, which allows you to use your long-tail phrase for a desktop, and shorter ones in a mobile search, when location is already a factor.
Easy-to-use Tools
If your company hasn’t claimed its Google My Business listing (and 56 percent of businesses haven’t), you could be seriously missing out.
This is the tool that creates a map of nearby businesses on your search results page. It’s how Google verifies details about your company in order to provide up-to-date information for its users, like hours, address, and contact information.
Customers are twice as likely to consider your business to be reputable if you have a complete Google listing. And best of all, it’s absolutely free.
Bing Places for Business is Bing’s equivalent program, and you should absolutely take advantage of that, too.
Other easy tools include directories like Yelp, Superpages, YP. Knowing what options are available for local SEO in Brisbane can maximize your brand awareness.
Boosts Profits
Local SEO is a nearly-guaranteed way to increase your revenue. 97 percent of consumers start their sales process online, largely with a search engine query.
And in terms of mobile users, 88 percent of users who search for a nearby business will make contact or visit their store within 24 hours.
The window to access these users is huge and wide open for your business. By making sure your local SEO is optimized for any user on any device, you’ll have increased visibility, and with it, increased sales.
Incentive-based Marketing Campaigns
When you’re making sure that most local customers are seeing your web content, it becomes that much easier to give them a slight push through your door. Offering coupons and deals for your social media fans and website visitors will help to draw customers to your business even more consistently after you pop up on their web searches.
This will have a couple of benefits for your business. First, customers using a coupon outspend those without by 24 percent, adding a natural boost to your revenue. Having a tangible way to directly link a coupon-carrying customer to your website is also a way to measure ROI from your local SEO campaign.
Easy To Track KPI
There are several ways to track key performance indicators (KPI) when you’re using local SEO. This will give you a measurement of how effective your campaign is, and provide accurate results.
Checking your rankings on both search engines and local directories will show you how likely you are to be seen. As you move up the ranks, you’ll know that your efforts are working. If not, you’ll know that it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
If you’re using a web data tracker (and you absolutely should be), you can see where your traffic is coming from, and which sources are most consistent. You can use that information to niche down your target audience even more and tailor your content accordingly.
There are so many reasons to make sure your content is optimized for local searches. For more information on SEO in Brisbane, check out our blog.
