Having in mind the high number of small/medium businesses and the fact that more than half of the consumers are using the internet to find information on local companies, without a doubt, the need of local SEO is high.

First of all, when did Internet professionals started using local SEO? One thing is certain; local SEO wasn’t the first element to work on at the beginning of the Internet boom. Instead, people were at first happy that they could access demands from all over the world through Internet, so though they were optimizing on generic all-around terms. Some businesses, especially larger ones, managed to grow and increase earnings this way, but some of them cannot work on this way. Instead, they had to target their services and offers onto certain locations. It is useless for a local business (as for example a restaurant from Kansas City) to target audience from London.

Usually, small businesses get a higher success rate using local SEO than larger ones. Because they require targeting a smaller number of clients from a certain restrained area, it is easier to focus on the exact needs and to in-depth analysis of the demand. Large businesses tend to lose their hard-earned top-positions in SERP mainly because those companies don’t do proper local SEO. One example refers to the need of having more than one landing page for a company that targets different locations for its business. This way it will increase chances that the visitor will get exactly what he wants, and not some generic information which is supposed to please possible customers from all areas.

Trying to manage the same ranking on different cities can be a downside for companies having to target more than one location. It might happen that the ranking of one location to be lower than the one from another location targeted, so this way instead of improving and managing individual rankings for each customer-targeted location, the company flattens the rankings; even though this way some of the city rankings will grow, some of them will drop. Individual location ranking optimization is a must-do in order to preserve and pump the rankings correctly and efficiently.

Finally, here are some tips that any entrepreneur can use when doing local SEO optimization for his company:

• Include the physical address in every page of the company’s website. Visitors need to know every time where the business is located.
• Start using map services like Google Maps; you can register your own business on the map, and then get higher rankings
• Add reviews for your business. Many search engines and local sites allow you to place a form on which your customers can rate and review your business. Do not try to fake the reviews or remove negative reviews. Without having any negative reviews, the customer might become suspicious and look for an alternative.
• Think as you are one of your future clients when doing local SEO. Focus on less-generic keywords which have a greater chance of bringing in customers (and this way, sales), instead of general keywords that mostly add up to the traffic.