Local SEO helps you promote your business to people within your area. That means whenever they have the need to search for a product or service related to you in the local area, they will likely land on your website.
For example, say you’re a bakery based in Cambridge, and someone who’s just moved to the area wants to find somewhere to pick up a fresh loaf of bread; if your website is fully optimised for SEO and located close to the searcher, they’ll probably discover your website on the search engine results page and interact with you.
Local SEO is great at improving conversions. Most searches conducted with local intent are usually from customers with an urgency to purchase.
Typically they’re on mobile, and looking for a quick solution to a problem. For instance, think of how many times you’ve reached for your phone when looking for a service in your area.
Recently, search engines such as Google have started to prioritise local SEO over other organic SEO rankings. This means you need to optimise for both in order to have the best chances of reaching a wider audience.
As such, if you’re a small business with a local presence, you should be optimising your site for local SEO.