It’s long established that SEO is a smart strategy to employ to ensure a competitive advantage. It’s no longer just an option — rather, it’s a complete must. But if you want to take a more focused approach so people who can physically get in touch with your business can easily do so, local SEO is something to strategically implement.

According to a Northern Arizona SEO company, local SEO will perform a much better job of optimizing your website so you can gain higher rankings in local searches. Studies reveal that through local SEO, businesses improve their performance by as much as 50 percent.

So how is local SEO different?

First of all, the keywords to be used need to include a particular location; they’re called geo-targeted keywords. For example, a web user is looking for the best donut place in his locality; of course, he’ll type in “best donuts” or “best donut place,” but he will be more specific and add his city because he wants the one nearest to where he is. Local SEO efforts meet this requirement.

SEO professionals say that including a location, such as “donut shop in Oceanside” triggers the “carousel.” Now, what is the “carousel?” Basically, this is an image rich line-up of search results. Out of these results, several are local results, which the carousel derives from user reviews, public uploads, the businesses’ posts, blogs, and photo uploads to the Google+ Local page.

If you want your business to be one of the local results, you need to design your SEO strategies in a way that effectively targets those web users looking for a business like yours in your locality. It’s imperative that there are different kinds of content about your business that have geo-targeted keywords.

In addition to those, for your business to be further optimized for local search, you need to use or have the following:

• Responsive website design. Most local searches are done through mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs.
• Name, address and phone number of your business. Make sure they’re on all the pages of your website.
• Quality inbound links. Links from quality sites can boost your business’s online reputation.
• New, original and unique content that mentions your products or services. Perhaps consider creating a blog that you update regularly with fresh information such as tips, news and high quality images.
• Listings with top local directories.
• Local citations. These will increase visibility in searches and at the same time boost your brand image.
• Reviews of your products or services. SEO efforts can actually create these for you. Content writers and bloggers can post their testimonials and reviews in their own sites, social media, and other platforms, and link all that to your website. Reviews from Yelp are valuable as well for local SEO.

SEO efforts intended for local searches can make your business thoroughly accessible to people who can quickly act to your advantage. Therefore, if you wish for your business’s presence to be truly felt in your area, and to increase sales, conversions, or traffic, you mustn’t overlook local SEO.