What Is Local SEO and How Do I Get Better at It
In today’s digital era, the automotive industry has become increasingly reliant on the internet to connect with consumers. Automotive SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a critical tool for businesses in this sector. This article provides an overview of Automotive SEO, its importance, key components, and the challenges it presents. Whether you’re a car dealership or an auto repair shop, understanding the basics of Automotive SEO can make a substantial difference in your online visibility and competitiveness.
Understanding Local SEO
What is local SEO?
Local SEO is a strategy usually used by Brick-and-mortar businesses that rely on physical visits, such as:
–Car Dealerships
–Doctors
–Restaurants and Cafes
–Retail Stores
–Service-Based Businesses
–Legal Firms
–Real Estate Agents
–Home Services
These businesses optimise their Local SEO to ensure that people in the local area can find them based on their location. But how does it work?
Local SEO functions by informing search engines about your business’s location. When someone searches for a business like yours within your local area, your business should appear at the top of the search results. Achieving this involves various strategies, which we will explore in detail later in this blog.
Importance for small and medium Businesses
Local SEO has an exceptional importance for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). While larger companies may also benefit from Local SEO, its impact is often not as large. For SMBs, more specifically, those not widely recognized on a national or global scale, investing in effective Local SEO can be a game-changer.
Small businesses with limited recognition but robust Local SEO strategies can experience rapid growth within their local areas. When people in their service area search for relevant products or services, these businesses are featured in search results, driving more traffic and, ultimately, more customers to their doors.
Key Strategies for Improving Local SEO
Google My Business Optimization
By setting up and optimizing your Google My Business (GMB), you let google know more about your business and is likely to rank higher in your local areas. This strategy is important for your business since without it Google has limited data and might show your business website to less people, resulting in less potential clients. Setting up your GMB is not a difficult process, heres our guide that will help you go through the setup process:
Local SEO
Local SEO is crucial for car dealerships. In order to attract clients in the area, it is important that your dealership appears in local search results and maps, which can be achieved by optimising for location-based searches.Your local SEO can also be improved by consistently adding local content to your dealership’s website, such as announcements of sponsored events or local activities. When you combine these strategies, you’ll not only increase your internet visibility but also strengthen your connection to the community.
Local Keywords Research and Usage
Local Keyword research involves targeting a location specific keyword which is relevant to your business area, this will help your website appear in local searches, which will help you get more clients and help your local community find your service easily.
To find these keywords, companies use softwares which can track and give data, such as volume, traffic, difficulty and so on. But how do you implement your now gained knowledge?
After figuring out which Keywords you want to rank for, you need to implement them into your website, this can be done in different ways, but the most commonly used one is On-Page Optimization, On-Page meaning the content which you have on your page. Optimising your page’s content to include your keywords of choice will help google know what exactly your website is about and will then show your website to the correct people.
Local Link Building
While Having really good SEO optimised content is really important, at some point you will hit a roadblock, even if you create a great piece of content, it might not be seen by many people, the reason for that is, search engines prefer pages with more backlinks, but what is a backlink?
A backlink is simply, a link on someone else’s page that points to your website, the more websites that point to your website, the more search engines will trust you, but how do we get people to put a url on their website that points to our page?
Building backlinks is not an easy task, to get backlinks you would have to provide something to the website, it’s not just a deed from them, but a value exchange, if you provide a website owner with good information, for example important statistics that they can put in their blog, they are likely to help you out too by putting the source of their statistics on their page. You could reach out to these website owners through email and maybe even help them improve their content with some piece of information that you have, which might also result in a backlink. These are just some possibilities, there are many other ways to get backlinks, but that’s a whole post on its own.
Creating Local Content
To get people in your area to open your page and look at the information, you must be offering really good information. To do this, you must write content that is optimised for your customers. You must have catchy content which will keep them on the page for longer and make them engage, read the whole text and maybe even send the page to some of their relatives/friends.
You must make sure to be using keywords in your content so that these people can find you easily, which is a topic we covered earlier. Use your creative skills when writing such content, you don’t want to sound like a robot, afterall, the people reading your content will want to feel like there’s a human on the other side of the screen, they are way more likely to stay on the page if the content they are reading feels exactly like if someone were explaining it to them in real life.
Tools and Resources for Local SEO
Overview of SEO tools
So far, we covered a bunch of strategies and ways you can improve the local SEO for your business. Now, to make our life a little easier, we use tools to help us with things like content writing, keyword research and everything SEO related. Here is a list of tools and their purpose which you can use to improve your website.
1:Google Analytics: Offers comprehensive website analytics and user behaviour data. (Free)
2:Google Search Console: Monitors website performance in Google search results and provides insights. (Free)
3:Moz Pro: A suite of SEO tools including keyword research, site auditing, and link analysis.
4:SEMrush: Provides competitive research, keyword analysis, and site auditing.
5:Ahrefs: Known for its backlink analysis, keyword research, and site explorer features.
6:Yoast SEO: A WordPress plugin that helps optimise on-page SEO. (Free with premium option)
7:Screaming Frog SEO Spider: Crawls websites to identify SEO issues and provides data on site structure. (Free with a paid version)
8:Majestic: Focuses on backlink analysis and offers various SEO-related tools.
9:Ubersuggest: Offers keyword research, content ideas, and competitor analysis. (Free with a paid version)
10:BuzzSumo: Helps identify popular content and influencers in your niche.
Additional learning resources
Continuously improving your SEO skills is really important considering that people are constantly finding new trends and strategies to rank better. To stay ahead, you should regularly follow SEO blogs and engage with people in for example SEO community pages. Networking with people about the new trends and strategies will help you gain a better understanding and bring a lot of value.
Additionally, you can take courses on youtube, udemy or other platforms, and apply the knowledge you gained in your projects to test the new information that you had just learned. Another important source of information is your competitors, you can look at what your competitor is doing, which will help you get a better understanding of the places in which you are lacking and maybe even places in which you are better than them.