What is local SEO?

Local SEO makes your website discoverable at the local level. When someone in your area searches for your service or product, local SEO ensures that they can find you.

Local SEO has become much more important to Google recently. This is evident in the fact that Google is now showing more and more local businesses in its search results. This presents opportunities for local business owners.

You can improve your local visibility by ensuring your website ranks high in search results, as well as through Google My Business and Google Maps. With local SEO, you can also gain an edge over the major national players.

Tasks we perform as part of a local SEO project:

  1. Optimizing Your Google My Business Profile. Google My Business is one of the most important ways to improve your local visibility.
  2. An audit of your local business information online. Is it not correct? Then we’ll take care of it.
  3. Het toevoegen van je bedrijf aan lokale bedrijvengidsen.
  4. Creating local content. By creating local content tailored to search queries in your region, you’ll become even more visible to local users.
  5. Optimizing your website's technical aspects. This improves the user experience.
  6. Acquiring local backlinks. This is a strong signal that you are the leading authority in your region.
  7. Adding and optimizing structured data. Structured data helps Google understand even more about your business.

Google My Business

Google My Business ensures that your business appears on Google. If you set up Google My Business correctly, you’ll rank higher in local search results. In our blog, we explain exactly why Google My Business is important for local SEO and how to optimize it.

Read the blog

How Local SEO Can Help Grow Your Business

Implementing a solid local SEO strategy will make your business easier to find. Local SEO offers several benefits:

  • It increases your visibility among local consumers. As many as 97% of consumers search online for local services or local stores. Furthermore, only 5% look beyond the first page of Google.
  • It increases your website traffic, leads, and sales from your local target audience. Through local SEO, you’ll generate targeted leads or sales from visitors within your target area.
  • You'll stand out more from your competitors. Less than 50% of companies use local SEO, so there are huge opportunities to get ahead of your competitors and boost your local visibility.

How do you work on local SEO?

To ensure optimal local visibility, various activities are carried out as part of a local SEO strategy. First and foremost, it’s a good idea to optimize your Google My Business profile. When it’s set up correctly, your business will appear more quickly in local search results. This means not only creating an account, but also keeping all information up to date and providing Google users with accurate information.

1) Information in business directories

In addition, all information about your business on the internet must be accurate. If multiple addresses appear in various business directories, this can be confusing for both Google and users. This undermines the credibility of your business, and you’ll want to avoid that.

2) Adding your address to new business directories

Business directories are a useful way to send local signals to Google. This helps Google learn more about your business and conveys reliability to your target audience. Be sure to list your business in local directories and those specific to your industry.

3) Write local content

Writing local content is important for providing your target audience with the most relevant and valuable information. Through local content, you can offer solutions to the challenges your target audience faces. Furthermore, your content helps establish you as the leading expert in your field.

4) Optimize your website’s technical aspects

Technical aspects are the foundation of a searchable website. That’s why it’s essential to optimize your website technically. Proper technical optimization improves loading speed, which enhances the user experience. Additionally, good technical practices ensure that Google crawls and indexes pages correctly.

5) Get local backlinks

Backlinks are an important signal for Google. By acquiring relevant and authoritative local backlinks, you signal that you are the go-to local expert. So it’s not just content that’s important for building authority—backlinks also contribute to this. It’s crucial, however, that the backlinks are obtained the right way; otherwise, Google will penalize you.

What is link building?

Link building ensures that relevant links to your website are placed on websites that are themselves considered authoritative. Google views this as a signal that your website is also important, which helps your website achieve higher rankings.

Learn more about link building

6) Adding and optimizing structured data

Structured data, also known as “Gestructureerde Gegevens,” consists of snippets of code that are placed on a page. This code is not visible to visitors to your website, but it is visible to crawlers from Google and other search engines.

By using the right structured data, you provide Google with more information about your business, which helps Google better understand what you do or what products you sell. In addition, structured data can also help you stand out more in search results.

5 Local SEO Tips

Read our blog post, where we offer 5 local SEO tips to help you improve your local search visibility.

5 Local SEO Tips

How can we help you with local SEO?

After an introductory phone call, we’ll put together a presentation outlining your current situation, the opportunities available, and a plan of action. This ensures a thorough approach and a solid foundation for our continued collaboration.

Throughout the local SEO process, we’ll naturally stay in regular contact to show you what work we’ve done and what the results are. Depending on your own SEO knowledge and your internal capacity, we’ll handle all the work. Prefer to implement everything yourself? That’s no problem!

In that case, we’ll help you write valuable content and implement optimizations. That way, you’ll not only rank well, but visitors will also find relevant content that’s useful.

Every month, we schedule a Google Hangouts meeting to go over the following:

  • The work performed and the time spent
  • The tasks scheduled for the coming month
  • The results based on the agreed-upon KPIs
  • Keyword rankings based on a keyword analysis

We’ll help you become easier to find!

Are you ready to improve your local visibility? If so, we’d love to get started for you! Feel free to contact us for a no-obligation introductory meeting.

Why has local SEO become so important?

There are several reasons why local SEO has become so important these days— Google updates, for example. To make it easier to understand, we’ve listed the reasons below. Don’t forget that these days, nearly half of all search queries have a local intent.

  1. People no longer search using the Yellow Pages; they use Google instead. Since most local businesses can be found online, people now search using Google. After all, you get many more search results that you can easily compare.
  2. People are increasingly using their smartphones to search for local businesses in cities they're not familiar with.
  3. Google is getting better and better at handling local SEO. The Venice and Pigeon updates ensure that Google displays local search results more effectively. Your location is recognized, allowing Google to show you relevant, local search results. Our page on Google algorithm updates will teach you more about these updates.