Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important marketing tools in a company’s arsenal. In today’s world, if your business is not online, you have very little hope of reaching your target market. With SEO, reaching your target market is easier than before. SEO tools help you increase your online presence without paying huge bucks to search engines so they can run your sponsored ads. With SEO you receive organic visitors on your website.
If you learn to effectively use SEO, you can not only drive traffic towards your page but you can also improve your rankings on search engines. Though every business wishes for an international clientele, small to medium scale businesses expect to earn by driving traffic from the area around their business. To make sure that the word around your business is reaching the right kind of people, localization is extremely necessary.
This topic might seem very common and generic, but majority of the small business owners are still unaware of the actual importance of local SEO or ranking their business locally on Google. I found some shocking statistics on a digital agency’s website known for their remarkable SEO Services in Orlando.
- 66% of the business owners believe that exploring new customers is their top-priority
- 43% of the business owners focus on customer experience and retention enhancement
- Whereas, only 17% are investing in SEO
Shocking! Right? For the same reason, it is mandatory to highlight the actual importance of SEO and its localization to business owners, specifically SMBs.
Here are the ways in which SEO is incredibly important for localization:
1-Effective targeting of local customers
The most loyal patrons of your business should be the residents of the area in which your business operates. Billboards, signboards, and flyers are great options to target your clients but in today’s digital age, there is no greater targeting tool than the internet. When targeting locals, it’s extremely important to alter your message in order to make sure that the locals understand it. Since SEO is all about using the right keywords so that your target audience can find you easily, you can adapt your keywords to the local lingo to become more relatable and easily discoverable to your audience. If you are a new business, get settled into the community and learn their mannerisms so you can build an effective targeting base for them. Think of it this way: maybe your product/service is the one that customers are searching for but they can’t be driven to it because the terminology that you use for the product/service is completely different from the terminology that they are using. Furthermore, different countries have different social media platforms that are frequented by their populace. What Facebook is to the USA, WeChat is to China so don’t make the mistake of assuming that all places are the same.
2-Making customers feel comfortable
One single keyword is all it takes to take your brand to the top. If you think from the perspective of a customer, would you prefer a brand that uses fancy, confusing words that or a bran that uses easy to understand words from your local language that helps you grasp everything better? By using the native language of the customers, you are making it easy for them to reach out to you. Studies have shown that if people find a website that caters to their local language, then they spend more time on their page as it is easy for them to understand what the page is offering to them. This would lead to a higher number of visitors as well as a higher conversion rate. One of the worst mistakes that businesses make while localizing their web pages is only partially localizing the website. This not only misleads consumers but also creates bad word of mouth for your business.
3-Helping people trust your business
Another surprising way in which SEO can help in localization of your business is by building the credibility of your business. If you want to make sure that your business expands from just local clients to international clients, you first need to ensure that you have built a good reputation amongst your local clients. You can only move forward towards greener pastures once you are sure that the local community has placed their trust in your business. If your business ranks at a low level in local search engines, then you have very little hope of it making it to a good ranking spot internationally. Since credibility and reputation go hand in hand, it’s very important for you to use good SEO tools to build your brand. With over 2 billion websites out there, it’s very hard for businesses to compete for the attention of their customers. SEO, if done effectively, makes sure that your business stands out from the crowd.
Once you get the hang of using SEO tools to maximize the chances of your business getting swamped with visitors, you will find yourself at the top of search engines in no time at all. Whether you do it yourself or hire a professional to help you, the proper use of SEO will be an incredible marketing tool for your business.
