What are the best ways of revamping local SEO strategies for businesses?
That’s the right question, because Google’s constant algorithm updates keep delivering different changes – most commonly, such changes are modest – but sometimes there are really critical improvements impacting our current approach to local SEO for businesses. The thing is that not only Google itself, but people are also changing the way they are searching for small stores or service providers located nearby. So, we can also expect many new opportunities and updates to be realized over there throughout this year – that’s why it’s a really proactive action to revamp our currently valid local SEO strategies for online businesses, and the rest of regionally-targeted brick-and-mortar companies strongly dependent on their strong presence in Google’s online search. That being said, let’s see what can be done to that point.
Revamping Local SEO for Businesses: New Approaches & Targets
Google Lens
Put simply, with this feature, your smartphone can use the camera not only for shooting images/videos, but will be able to “understand” what’s around you trying to help you take a certain action available over there. Basically, this is what exactly the world's search giant can do for every online user employing Google Lens technology. From the viewpoint of local SEO for brick-and-mortar businesses, as well as physical stores or service providers, it means that visual search is definitely going to deliver a huge impact soon. And it can actually happen much sooner than we may think – that’s why every business owner with a strict regional targeting is recommended to consider optimizing for this brand-new approach to online search. Simply because your smarter rivals are most likely to be already taking proactive action.
Voice Search
Of course, mobile user queries based on the voice search aren’t anything extraordinary, but this trend is gradually gaining momentum in its own way. As it has been recently announced by Google’s officials, they expect something around 40-50% of all search queries to be handled via voice requests – by 2020 already. It means that every commercial project serving nearby locales will be inevitably affected by this powerful trend, gradually revamping existing optimization approach for normally used text-based queries – to provide at least a fully self-sufficient feature that supports conversational search queries. Taken in general, most of them are usually initiated with the commonest interrogative words and expressions like “who,” “where,” “how to,” “what,” and so on. So, optimizing for voice search using a properly structured markup in your website (i.e., areas served, opening hours, name, phone, and physical address) becomes now a MUST. That’s it.
Bottom Line
With all that taken together, we should keep up with our current strategies in local SEO for businesses, adapting them to the current search trends and the most expected ways of their ongoing development in the foreseeable future. It’s still necessary to claim your business listing on the most popular review sites and relevant local directories or big data aggregators. At the same time, however, NAP consistency and positive user feedback are going to become even more decisive, when it comes to determining local search rankings of every local business, disregarding its sphere of industry or specific niche targeting.
Every component of your Google Maps strategy must be properly optimized. That way, the importance of every element in Google Maps (like 360-degree business view) will be equally strong for gaining prominence in local SERPs, and therefore determine how many potential clients/buyers will be reaching its brick-and-mortar location.
Post a comment
