If you’re not investing in Local SEO, you’re not making the most of your search engine optimization budget. If you’re a local business or a national business with many different locations, local SEO is the best way to reach people that are immediately interested in what you have to sell and would actually be able to visit your store or office. People want to spend their money at local businesses, but in order to be able to do that, they have to be able to find you. They can only find you if you are present in the search results—and local SEO is the only way to make that happen.
Not convinced? Here are some of the most important local SEO stats you should know:
- 97% of people use the internet when looking for a local business. The other 3% use a phonebook or no resources at all. This means that if you’re not online and visible in relevant search results, you’re missing out on 97% of the business and profits you could be making.
- 98% of searchers will pick a business on the first page of Google. While you will still get traffic if you are on the second, third, or fourth pages, you will get far more traffic if you are on the first page. 98% of all searchers will pick a business on the first page—this is where you want to be.
- 34% of local searchers visit that store or office the same day they search. That’s a huge percentage of your traffic that will actually take action and come into your store or office—and one that you don’t want to be missing out on. The percentage is even higher (50%) if the consumer is using a smartphone to search for a relevant business.
- A third of consumers will look your store up before entering it. They may already be intending to come into your store or office, but that won’t stop them from first looking you up online. If you don’t show up in the search results, they might not view you as a legitimate business, or they might accidentally find one of your local competitors who does have a visible website and decide to visit their store or office instead.
- 45% of searchers are searching with the intention of finding a local store that carries the product they want or need. About that same percentage are looking for your business’s hours, while 38% are looking for your local store address. The percentage of people looking for the local store address skyrockets to 50% when the searchers are using their smartphones to make the search.
- SEO makes up about 40% of all traffic that your website will get over its lifetime. It doesn’t matter how much other promotion you are doing, if you are not implementing an effective local SEO strategy, you will be missing out on nearly 40% of the customers you could be working with.
- More than 50% of all local searches are performed on smartphones and that percentage will only continue to increase. Why should you care? Because if you don’t have a mobile-optimized webpage, more than half of those who do find your website are going to abandon it for a competitors if that competitor has a more useful mobile website.
- 50% of all mobile searches are conducted in hopes of finding local results, and 61% of those searches result in a purchase.
- 60% of smartphone owners use that device to look for local businesses through one search function or another. A whopping 90% of those searchers take action and more than 50% will make a purchase.
- 70% of clicks on links are organic. What does that mean? It means that about 30% of your clicks will be by people who click on your link because you are promoting it. The rest will find it organically through the search results—but only if you’re in the search results.
As a small business owner, why should you care about any of this? These stats prove that the best way to get local business is to have a robust local search engine optimization strategy. If you don’t show up in local search results, you’ll only be making a tiny fraction of the profits you could be making if you did show up in search results—period!
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Tim Dugan
Web Services CT
About Tim Dugan
