Local SEO Sydney

When it comes to local SEO, we are talking only about location. You want to target local customers only. You are very specific about areas you want to target, and they are generally within a 5-10 km radius of your business. We would still look at the usual SEO components such as ‘on page’, and ‘off page’ SEO, site speed, content and link building – except out focus is more local.

Search engines such as Google look for local signals about your website that tell them you’re a locally-based business. In terms of link creation and citations, we would look at adding your listing to local directories. With content, we would make sure you’re site is set up to target local customers. If you’re a locksmith in Mosman, we will look at creating pages targeting the Mosman area and surrounding suburbs like Neutral Bay, Cremorne and North Sydney. There’s no point going after locksmiths in Parramatta as you won’t travel that far.

With an excellent local SEO strategy, Google starts recognising your business in a particular area, pushing your website up the rankings and boosting your business profile within the area.

Have you ever noticed why some many companies seem to dominate Google locally for all keyword searches? The answer is they are implementing local SEO. Local SEO places a heavy emphasis on local directories, Google My Business and local bloggers within your niche ( submitting content about your business to other local bloggers will get your business recognised locally). Local SEO aims to make your business more relevant to local searches. These are the key driving factors behind your local SEO campaign. We make sure we add all the relevant information about your business like phone numbers, opening hours, product availability and photos of your staff and premises. These are key drivers in making you super-local.

Reviews also play a massive part in local SEO. Potential customers will find your website, and if they go to Google My Business part, they will find a whole bunch of reviews. Google reviews are a key driver in motivating people to buy. Encouraging happy customers to leave reviews will reinforce your business as a dominant local player.

Regular SEO, as opposed to local SEO, is implemented for businesses who require a more extensive online footprint, citywide or nationally. The consumer is not limited to a particular geographic area but can buy from anywhere in the country or world. Think e-commerce sites or large multinational brands.

Here’s an interesting statistic: 75% of locals searches in the past 12 hours resulted in an actual purchase. The whole local search arena is booming, with nearly 4 out of every 5 consumers adding a suburban location in their search. Known as ‘local intent,’ consumers are adding a city or place in their search criteria.

For example, you might be searching for an SEO Agency in Sydney rather than just an SEO agency. The reason being, you want to work with a local company within the  Sydney area. On the other hand, you may want to drill down even further, and you’ll search for an SEO Agency in Surry Hills. This tells Google you want a list of all local Sydney SEO agencies or SEO agencies in Surry Hills.

Another massive reason why local SEO is so essential for your business is the explosion in the use of mobile phones. 60% of people search for a product or service on their mobile phone when they need it. They might be driving around in their car looking for the nearest vet or pharmacy, and, at that point, they are ready to inquire.

Local searches by mobile users result in lots of more sales and inquiries. It’s a massive bonus for your business to be ranking locally.

You have probably noticed Google’s Local Pack, which displays the top 3 local businesses above all organic results. These results are incredibly helpful for mobile users on the go wanting fast information at their fingertips. They can quickly see opening hours and get their location and direction to the place via Google Maps – all this information without having to visit their website. Google has made it so easy for us to shop and buy locally.

For the reasons above, you can see why local SEO is such a fundamental component of most small businesses internet marketing. If you have a physical shop, you can’t afford not to be ranking at the top of Google when someone searches your product or service. You have to be there the exact moment someone searches. Priority positioning on Google is the only way to benefit from local search and get all those new business leads.

If this sounds stressful, we are here to help. Talk to SEO Sydney Experts about your Local SEO campaign now!

If you want to take advantage of local SEO through better local rankings, you have to do 3 things

and do them better than your competition. They are Google My Business, tweak your ‘on-page

SEO, and do this regularly.

1. Google My Business. You have to claim your listing and then optimise it by logging into your Google My Business account. You have to make it the very best by completing all the information, choosing the correct classification, adding pictures, posting updates, monitoring and encouraging reviews, and doing this on an on-going basis.
2. You also have to create a listing in other local and niche directories. Google will index these over time and start to recognise your business as a local leader. The more recognised directories you’re listed in, the higher you’ll eventually rank in the local SERP’s.  To rank locally, you have to be working on your website. Creating content, adding pages based on local content will all add to your local authority.

You can also add geo-specific pages to your website, which is excellent if you have a franchise business model or business in a couple of locations. But adding a few pages is not enough. You have to write specific local content for each area and optimise the page titles and descriptions.

All content must be unique and targeted to the local customer. You should have a local phone number, local address and local images. In terms of local content, don’t just throw in a few suburbs. You have to write about that business in that area and what makes it locally unique. Local content will build your profile and brand within the community.

It would be best if you also looked at inbound links, which are a powerful marketing tool and will help you rise in the local rankings. You have to get links from local blogs, online investing time and money in your local SEO, so you will need to see what the returns are.

So, how do you measure Local SEO?

You have to be tracking your local SEO, and this way, you will be able to answer two critical questions: is it working, or is it a waste of time?

Most SEO agencies will measure ROI through Google analytics. They will count site visits and site click-through rates as well as bounce rates. Analytics is all well and fine, BUT it doesn’t give you an accurate description of your local SEO efforts.

The problem is with your local SEO efforts is that customers may not be clicking through to your site as they have all the information they need through Google My Business. So how do you know where they came from and if this new customer visited your website?

GMB Insights will tell you how your local SEO campaign is going. That is the number of people that have clicked on your GMB listing and the number of impressions. That’s OK, but you also need to set up some conversion goals. That is set-up tracking for phone calls, email inquiries, contact form submissions, or an appointment booking form. GMB cannot tell you the phone calls you received from the profile, but it will tell you how many people clicked on the number.

An excellent way to measure local SEO’s effectiveness is to offer a promotion or unique offer (specific to GMB) with a link to that page. Via analytics, you will see how many users clicked on that link and how many page hits you received. If these numbers start to increase, your local SEO campaign is working well.

Another option is to use a nifty Insights report within your Google My Business profile – Driving Directions Requests. Here you can see how many people asked for directions to your shop.

Directions are not full proof as people might decide it’s too far away or has decided to do something else. But, at least is another measuring tool you have at your disposal. If requests for driving directions are continually increasing? Your Local SEO efforts are doing the job.

The key to local SEO ROI is to view trends over a month. While numbers are not 100% accurate, at least you can see what the trends are doing – a handy insight. Focusing on the local trends or insights can give you a great indication of what’s working and what’s not. Hint? At SEO Sydney Experts, we will help you determine your goals, track your local SEO campaigns and make light of this confusing topic. This way, you can work on your business and watch all those fabulous sales leads come streaming in!

It’s hard to give you an accurate figure about local SEO costs without knowing more about your business. We are not here to pluck a number out of thin air that sounds good to you. We do not work like this. Many other agencies do and will back this up with fake 90-day ranking guarantees. Watch out for these types of scams.

What we can talk about is value for your marketing dollar. We are all about generating the most traffic to your website from qualified buyers, which we do best. Most local businesses will look at cost if they are unclear about the SEO process. It would be best to look at the work involved and the years of training needed to get to where we are today.

So when it comes to how much you have to pay for your local SEO to be successful, you need to be allocating a generous proportion of your marketing budget. If you take the cheap option, that’s all you will end up getting—cheap SEO without any results. You have to ask yourself, are you prepared to risk this for the future of your business? One thing we can tell you is that cheap SEO nearly always ends up in a Google penalty. DON’T RISK IT!!

Local SEO takes time and quality link building. If you want fast results, then we have to do more work in a shorter period. Local SEO all adds up and costs money. The best way to approach this is to look at this from a long term perspective. Be prepared to do your local SEO for the life of your business. And have the monthly budget for this that won’t stretch you too far. Most of the clients we work with have been with us for years, with local rankings booming.

Another factor to consider when working out the cost of local SEO is your business’s competitive nature. Competitive niches will require more work, time, and link building. The top players in a tightly held niche will already be well ahead of you, so you have to fight this with everything you can. Competitive areas like law, travel, trades, food and health will be harder to rank than more specific niches. If we are targeting local SEO keywords like; hair loss treatments Sydney (still incredibly competitive), this will be easier to rank than the core keyword ‘hair loss treatments.

Another cost factor to consider is multiple store locations. Do you have one shop in the city, or are you all around Sydney in different areas? Ranking your stores, practices, gyms etc., in one location is a more straightforward process than multiple sites. Other places require lots more work and hence a much larger local SEO budget. Each location requires its own set of citations, link building and content creation.

Creating and maintaining local citations is a time-consuming job, so the more locations you have, the more effort and time it will take and, therefore, a larger budget.

Ready to jump-start your local SEO campaign? Talk to the team at SEO Sydney Experts. We will work tirelessly to get you the best rankings you have ever had.

We get asked this question all the time; how long before we start to see results with our local SEO? We don’t work at Google, so we can’t say how long it will take. But, what we can say is that if we go by our proven SEO formula, like with SEO, your local SEO campaign should start to see an improvement in a couple of months. With local SEO, you have to be in it for the medium to long term, which requires patience.

Are you a new business start-up? If you have just claimed your Google My Business Page and have never done any SEO type before on your site, this process will take longer. If your an established business with a substantial online presence, we should rank you a lot faster. You might be sitting on page 2 or 3, and in a couple of months, you will hit page 1. The beauty of SEO for established businesses is that rankings are achievable within a much shorter time frame.

Another essential factor to consider is the approach you take towards local SEO. Are you the type of person that will want to do it yourself? If so, rankings will take longer as you have to dedicate your own time to do this. Plus, if you’re a novice, you may stuff things up and hurt your rankings. If you work with a Local SEO agency, like SEO Sydney Expert, you will have a team of dedicated specialists who will get the job done much sooner.

There is one last significant timing factor to consider, as well. That is your allocated SEO budget.

The more you are prepared to invest in your marketing, the more effort we can put in. Results will happen sooner as more resources put into your SEO campaign. That’s because we can post more content, test out different tactics, build more links, add blogs, news items and make sure your site is performing well.

But no matter your budget, Local SEO should be viewed for the long haul. Don’t expect miracles immediately, as it doesn’t work that way.

Tip: walk away from SEO agencies that promise instantaneous results as they are just saying what you want to hear to win your business.