Why Local Search Engine Optimization Is So Critical For Businesses
The Internet is truly one of the most incredible inventions that human civilization has ever come up with. The Internet has brought information from all over the world to your fingertips and totally revolutionized the way that business is conducted. It is estimated that over 3.6 billion individuals are online, and over the next couple of years, nearly everyone in the world is going to be connected to the Internet and using it in one form or another.
Search engines are one of the most commonly used Internet applications. Given the fact that there are over 300 million websites online, search engines like Google are used by Internet users to locate information they are searching for on a business. The major search engines like Yahoo, Bing and Google tend to only show 10 or fewer results on the first page of their results for every keyword query. Most people don’t end up searching past the first page and find what they are looking for within the first page of results.
Since there is a limited amount of space available on the first page of the search engine results, it is important for businesses to ensure that they rank within the first page of results for the keywords that are relevant to their businesses in order to obtain organic traffic from the major search engines. Although business can purchase pay per advertising from the major search engines in order to drive traffic to their websites, the cost of paid advertising can add up very quickly. Therefore, it is important for business to find other ways of obtaining traffic for local searches on the search engines less expensively.
Search Engine Optimization Explained
More than 200 factors are used by Google for ranking web pages. Many of those factors may be tweaked to get a website to rank high within the search engine results. That means businesses can obtain free traffic via the major search engines through optimizing their websites so that the search engines find them more attractive.
Search engine optimization can be defined as the science of managing those factors in order to get a website ranked higher within the search engine results.
Remember that the major search engines guard their algorithms very closely that they use for determining their search rankings. That is why search engine optimization experts frequently do data scraping and tests on their own in order to discover the factors that impact the search engine rankings the most.
These days nearly everyone has a smart phone. According to research studies almost 60% of American adults own a smart phone, and this percentage continues to grow very rapidly. That also means people are basically online 24 hours per day.
It is estimated that over 95% of consumers conduct searches online prior to buying a service or product. Numerous studies have shown that a majority of individuals search for local information whenever they are using their smart phones to obtain information.
Google reports that its search engines is used by over 90% of mobile users for finding the address or phone number of local businesses. In addition, usually local searches result in a purchase being made 3 out of 5 times. That is why it is so important for local businesses to develop a strong online presence and maintain it in order to rank high for relevant local searches to obtain more business.
At one point in time local business didn’t really need to put a lot of effort into local search engine optimization within their overall marketing plans or strategy. However, these days, to ignore this is very risky. Consumers expect businesses too have a strong online presence. Consumers rely on search engines to provide them with the information they are looking for. If a local business doesn’t have an online presence, then for most consumers these days they might as well not exist at all.