Go to your laptop or phone right now. Open the search engine of your choosing and enter the word ‘bakery.’
Note that we didn’t specify our search. We didn’t ask “What is a bakery?” or “The German word for the bakery.” We also didn’t ask for “bakeries in New York” or “bakery near me.” Yet, your search engine will have covered all these bases: it has given you a link to an encyclopedic entry and a few bakery-related websites. It will have suggested a list of things “people also search for.”
Most importantly though, it has given you suggestions of bakeries near you. Even without you specifically looking for it. This is the power of local SEO in Ottawa.
Now go ahead and try the same experiment with other businesses and terms: lawyer, groceries, pet barber – even marketing.
What would have been the stuff of science fiction as recently as the early 1990s has become an everyday occurrence. Search engines scour the vast universe of the internet for us to provide relevant (important word!) results to our searches. Most importantly though, it also will provide us with results near us.
As a business, your local clientele is your bread and butter (unless you are some sort of corporate juggernaut like Coca-Cola). This is especially true if you are in retail, the service industry, or as a contractor. Therefore, once people near you enter a search term related to your business, you want your business to pop up as one of the top results. To achieve that means you need to be conducting local SEO.
Local SEO in Ottawa is like regular SEO with the special caveat of being targeted directly towards your local area. There are essentially two aspects to local SEO. One is user-related and the other business-related.
Let’s start with the user-related one, namely the user’s location. Google simply tracks a user’s geolocation and IP address. Through the combination of the two – and the user’s agreement to the tracking of the same – Google can accurately pinpoint a user’s location.
That is the easy part. How then does Google pick the local businesses connected to the user’s location and their search? This is where things become interesting as there is more to it than simply clicking ‘I Agree.’
It begins with verifying your business with Google. By taking that step, you have already improved your standing with Google. Also make sure to include your NAP information (name, address, phone). It seems trivial but taking these simple steps already indicates to Google that you are a legitimate business and want to be found.
Things get a little more complicated from there. Other points of emphasis of local SEO include content optimization (with respect to your local area), review generation, and optimizing your website for mobile use. Local SEO is a lot of work and requires constant input because your competition doesn’t sleep!
Can you conduct local SEO yourself? Technically, yes. But you will need a full-fledged local SEO strategy and, more than likely, a full-time SEO specialist who can implement it, as well as regularly keep up with changes to Google’s algorithm and your competition’s efforts to outperform you.
For many local businesses, it is, therefore, more convenient (and affordable) to work with companies offering professional local SEO services. We at Marketing Blendz are your local SEO experts. We provide local SEO services tailored to your business that can give you the edge against your competitors by:
> Improving conversion rates
> Improving online visibility
> Improving your SERP ranking
> Build citations network
> Comprehensive customer review strategy
All of this with local SEO in mind.
For more information on our local SEO services, contact your Ottawa local SEO experts at Marketing Blendz today!
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