If you want your organization to rank online, get found by your target audience, and convert customers, you need a comprehensive local SEO audit.

Whether you run an auto repair shop in Columbus, Ohio, a Thai restaurant in Austin, Texas, a private practice clinic in Orlando, Florida, or a law firm in Tucson, Arizona, your business needs local SEO strategies to drive more customers to your brick-and-mortar business location.

What Are the Benefits of Local SEO?

• Improved online visibility
• Enhanced website traffic for searches relevant to your business
• Build authority and credibility within your community
• Gain repeat business
• Cost-effective advertising

Improved Online Visibility

When you implement the right SEO strategies for your business, your business website will get found by your ideal customers. This means you can focus on consumers that are interested and ready to purchase your products and services – at the right time. Simply put, improved online visibility is equivalent to more profits.

Enhanced Online Traffic for Relevant Searches

Not focusing on local SEO means that you may be competing in irrelevant search results with other businesses who are not even in the same niche as yours. Because of this, consumers will either pass you over or disregard you because you are not what they are looking for.

With local SEO, you can be seen by your target consumers online at the same time they are looking for your product or service.

Build Authority and Credibility Within Your Community

A successful local SEO strategy will have improved search engine rankings and consistently show up in relevant local search results.

In effect, other local businesses will likely propose to cross-promote their products and services on your platform.

When companies within the locality know about you, you can get cited in their posts with a link to your own website.

This brings more local customers to you and improves your community standing.

Gain Repeat Business

Attracting new customers is well and good. However, inspiring them to be loyal to your brand is even better. You will gain more repeat customers when you provide exemplary service – starting from your online platforms to your brick-and-mortar store.

Local SEO Is Cost-Effective

Compared to traditional marketing tactics, SEO is more economical. With local SEO, you can focus on online consumers actively in search of your products or services.

This feature helps local businesses use their advertising budget more efficiently. It’s because of the certainty of generating high-quality leads for their business, compared to cold-calling, word-of-mouth referrals, or other traditional marketing strategies.

Online Success Starts with a Local SEO Audit

Search engine optimization is an essential component in a successful digital marketing campaign. It’s a complex process that involves the following basic elements:

• Keywords
• Website content, design, and development
• Analysis, monitoring, finetuning

It’s a multifaceted process composed of several stages to help a website get improved search engine rankings.

By extension, local SEO follows similar steps of general SEO with confined guidelines.

Local SEO allows your business website to climb the ranks of local search results, get found by customers within your targeted area, and get their patronage.

If you own and operate a business locally, one of the most indispensable marketing strategies you can do is focus on local SEO.

Your website must meet the needs and requirements of search engines to earn higher rankings. Only then can you persuade local consumers to give you their business.

You need to start with a local SEO audit to succeed in this feat.

What Is Local SEO Audit?

Before you can build your local SEO strategy, you need to evaluate your local SEO’s current standing and performance.

Think of it as a health check and evaluation of your organization’s position online.

A local SEO audit will reveal the gaps in your strategies and what you need to do to fill them. This will, in turn, boost your local search rankings so you can be seen consumers within your geographic location.

Ideally, you need to do a local SEO audit periodically, not just when you are about to start a local SEO campaign. In accordance with a local SEO audit, you also need to apply the proper monitoring and tracking tools to measure your local SEO performance.

Benefits of Doing an SEO Audit for Your Business

• You can be proactive in implementing the right measures to improve your website’s online visibility.
• With an ongoing local SEO strategy, you can enhance your sales, leads, and other essential metrics.
• You can settle on-page issues and make sure search engines understand what your website is all about.
• You can distinguish areas for improvement that will put your business in front of consumers actively looking for your products or services.
• You can analyze what your competitors’ online behavior.
• You can create an excellent user experience for your site visitors.

Components of a Local SEO Audit

A local SEO audit uncovers your organization’s overall status’s online standing. It will reveal the strengths and witnesses of your website and what you can do to make sure it’s up to par. A professional local SEO firm can guide you through these vital steps.

Local SEO Audit Checklist

Google My Business

Typically, a local SEO audit starts with Google My Business. It’s a free platform initiated by Google to put local businesses in front of users looking for their products or services.

As a business with a physical location, one of the most important things you can do to boost your business online is to optimize your Google My Business account.

Claiming your GMB listing will legitimize your business online. You will also have higher chances of appearing in Google Maps and local Google searches – the most popular platform consumers use when looking for companies within their geographical location.

Customer Reviews

Feedbacks and reviews are one of the leading local search ranking indicators.

This is online consumer reviews hold just as much value as personal recommendations.

Before a prospective customer calls your business or visits your location, they take their time read through your reviews on different places online: Google, social media sites, and other review sites.

Therefore, if your business has plenty of positive reviews and feedback across the internet, it lets search engines know that you are a credible and legitimate business.

In turn, an essential component of a local SEO campaign is monitoring, scaling, and showcasing your customer reviews.

On-Page SEO Elements

These are the SEO components that you can manage, including:

• NAP (Name, Address, Phone) – Your NAP must be up-to-date, consistent, and displayed prominently across your site.
• Content – When you plan your website content strategy, make sure you produce content that consumers and search engines deem valuable, creative, and original. A local SEO audit will reveal any duplicate content, broken links, missing metadata, and other on-page SEO elements that need to be fixed.

Link Signals

Backlinks are an integral part of making your web pages rank. A competent local SEO company can develop a link-building strategy to meet all your business goals.

A periodic local SEO audit includes evaluating all your backlink profiles.

This ensures that you have no association with websites with low domain authority; these links will negatively affect your local search rankings.

Local SEO Audit: Key Takeaway

Implementing periodic local SEO audits is vital in a successful digital marketing campaign.

These evaluations will bring to light the status of your performance. In effect, you can do the suitable measures to continue using local SEO as a powerful marketing tool to boost your local business.

If you need more guidance, make sure to work with a professional and experienced local SEO firm.