Local SEO: What Is It & How to Do It

Local SEO is the process of optimizing your online presence to increase local traffic, visibility, and brand awareness. 

Common local SEO tasks include:

• Optimizing your Google Business Profile


• Finding local keywords


• Creating locally relevant content

Among others.

And any business that has a physical location or serves a geographic area can benefit from local SEO. 

Why Is Local SEO Important? 

The best way to get your site in front of people in your area is to use local SEO marketing.

Over 75% of consumers in the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom use Google when looking for business information. 

Making it the most dominant search engine for local search in those (and many other) countries. By far. 

And Google Maps searches for “shopping near me” have grown globally by more than 100% year over year. 

Mobile searches for “store open near me” also grew by over 250% in a recent two-year period. And “where to buy” + “near me” keywords by more than 200%. 

That’s hundreds of millions of searches every day. 

How Local SEO Works 

On top of Google’s usual ranking factors, its local search algorithms use three main factors to help find the best match:

• Relevance (how closely related a Google Business Profile result is to the words a searcher uses in their query)


• Distance (how far Google believes a user is from a business when they search)


• Prominence (how important Google thinks a business is to its potential customers)

Then, Google displays two types of search results for local searches.

The “local pack” results (Google Maps and Business Profiles) and organic results.