Why Does My Business Need SEO When It Serves A Local Market?

Your business website needs SEO even if it serves a local market. If you have a local business, you need to think in terms of local SEO and about the local ranking of your website. Local SEO will help your business website come up in search results for related queries in your area. Since Google shows local results first in a lot of cases, you need to make sure that Google understands where you are located.

Google itself talks about local ranking factors in terms of:


Relevance – are you relevant for the user? Does your website match what the user is looking for?

Distance – how far away are you located? If you are relevant and near, you’ll get a good ranking.

Prominence – this is how well your business is known.

Google My Business

For your local ranking in Google, you can’t do without a proper Google My Business ranking. To get it going, you need to enlist in Google My Business, add all your locations, verify them and share some photos. Google My Business also allows for customer reviews. You should try to get some of your customers to give you a positive review on your listing. This will help Google regard your business as relevant.

Keep your NAP consistent across the internet

Even if your business has multiple locations, make sure to match the main NAP (name, address, phone number) on your website with your Google My Business NAP. That is the only way to make sure that Google makes the right connection between the two. For SEO purposes add the main address on every page of your website. As a local business, it makes sense to have your address on every page. If you have other locations, set up a special page and list all the addresses of your other locations.

Facebook listing and reviews

You should set up a company page on Facebook. This helps with SEO because it’s another link that your business appears on, and Facebook ranks highly in Google listings. People also search on Facebook directly. Facebook also allows for reviews so try to get satisfied customer to write some positive reviews about your company.

Put your city and state in your title tags

It’s important for business SEO to add your location to your title tags. It’s simple to do and will get noticed by search engines. Include your address in the title tags on as many pages as you can so that it’s clear where your location is. Google can then place your business in search engines when people search for your location. You want to be seen in Google. Make it easy for Google to know where you are.

Use local directories to help your local ranking

Directories like Yelp and other local directories help determine how important and local you are. Find the most important local directory pages and put your link in those directories. Make sure your NAP is consistent across these pages so that your business is always found by the same address. Citations in directories work in confirming the address to both Google and visitors.


As you can see, SEO is important for local businesses just as it is for national businesses. Local businesses need to use different strategies to rank locally. Local SEO can make a big difference to your bottom line. For more information on local and global SEO, please keep reading our blog.