How Do Local Businesses Benefit Best From Local SEO?

Local businesses stagnate when they become complacent about their success. That damages growth for no good reason. Businesses have many means to continually improve sales numbers, such as applying local SEO, whether by doing it themselves or hiring a Chicago local SEO agency.

Here are nine ways your Chicago business benefits from following local SEO best practices:

1. Reach local customers.

2 .Know customers better.

3. Hear from the community.

4. Overtake the competition.

5. Grow brand awareness.

6. Highlight your proximity.

7. Join Google’s Local Pack

8. Raise ROI and reduce CPA.

9. Build loyal customers.

There’s a lot to discuss, so get ready to take notes about perfecting SEO in Chicago.

Watch this video to learn about the Digital Authority Partners approach to local SEO:

9 Important Benefits of Local SEO for Local Businesses

The digital space has opened numerous avenues for building a better business, including search engine optimization (SEO). Among the companies that stand to gain the most benefit are local small businesses, such as retail and food service. The shift in consumer behavior favors local search, which SEO helps you address.

     1. Reach Local Customers

SEO’s key benefit generally comes back to discoverability through search engines. This is vital for local businesses because people almost always first look for solutions, products, or services within their immediate area. Without local SEO, you reduce your ability to capture customers' attention.

Keywords are one of the go-to facets of SEO that help you successfully navigate this issue. Using keywords that accurately match customers’ search terms and search intent brings you closer to your target market. Writing helpful content for your audience makes your business much easier to find.

     2. Know Customers Better

Research and feedback are major aspects of a good local SEO strategy, so you inevitably learn an extraordinary amount about your customers. Preliminary information from market research is supplemented by what you get in comments through your business’s communication channels.

You could even collect more market data through the many practices that local businesses use today, such as participation in surveys in exchange for rewards. This shows a commitment to customer service and a sincere appreciation of your customers, both of which are great for brand loyalty.

     3. Hear from the Community

You can get feedback from customers in different ways. In the case of local SEO, comments on your business profiles, social media pages, and websites are the top choices. Any well-earned positive comment can attract more customers to your business if used correctly.

For example, displaying comments on local landing pages reassures prospects that others have tried your products or services and had a good experience interacting with your business. You can even spin them into paid ads by highlighting those parts of your business that customers love the most.

     4. Overtake the Competition

A website optimized for local SEO effectively uses meta tags to rank higher than its competitors. That is what makes local SEO so valuable for small businesses. You do not need a massive corporate budget to achieve top results; you just need some skill and patience.

Other local SEO top tips, such as name, address, and phone number (NAP) consistency, also add to your business’s competitive edge. Part of what makes following these tips straightforward is that they often connect, so your foundation of local SEO continues to grow.

     5. Grow Brand Awareness

Just because your business is discoverable on search engines does not mean people know or care about it. However, you can create content that appeals to your ideal customers using what you learned about your audience through research. Essentially, you learn how to stand out.

Local search is tied to maps with fewer competitors and less noise, which is helpful for awareness. You can also appear on map services with the appropriate business profiles. Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Bing Maps are some of the bigger names available.

     6. Highlight Your Proximity

Proximity measures how close you are to searchers, another important factor in local search. The closer you are to the searcher, the more likely it is that you will appear higher in search results. Many other factors influence rankings, however, so do not take this as a guarantee of a better ranking.

Other businesses are undoubtedly aiming for the same goals, so you must outplay them differently. However, proximity, as indicated by your NAP on business profiles (notably your Google Business Profile (GBP) profile), is another quick and free way to boost your ranking.

     7. Join Google’s Local Pack

If your business fits Google’s definition of "helpful" for users, you might find yourself among its featured snippets. A featured snippet is a randomly selected result that the algorithms deem to be the best answer to a user’s query and appears in its box at the top of the results pages.

For local Chicago businesses, the local pack matters most. This featured snippet comprises three suggestions generated by Google in response to local business searches. The local pack is for businesses with a physical location, such as restaurants and entertainment spots.

     8. Raise ROI, Reduce CPA

Since most of what you can achieve with local SEO is low-cost, if not free, you can expect to get a better return on investment (ROI). For the same reason, you can keep your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) relatively low by attracting customers through organic traffic.

Local SEO emphasizes building deep, genuine connections and long-lasting relationships. The trade-off is that organic traffic requires much more effort to maintain. You can use paid marketing campaigns to offset this and expand your online reach for a better ROI.

     9. Make Loyal Customers

Customer relationships are at the core of good local SEO. Everything you do leads to a loyal customer base, whether that is through positive engagement with your brand or providing excellent customer experience (CX). Even ad campaigns can help your business in this regard.

By promoting the best parts of your business, you draw in people who benefit from and truly value the solutions you provide. The overall impact of local SEO strategies can be summed up as knowing your customers and business well enough to create lasting and meaningful relationships.

Summing Up

Thanks to its varied strategies, local SEO is a source of many invaluable benefits for local businesses, such as online visibility and higher ranking. Some, including making NAP consistent, are challenging to juggle with other important daily tasks that keep businesses running smoothly.

If you have the budget, hiring a local Chicago SEO agency removes much of the difficulty of applying this.

Need help making a local SEO strategy for your Chicago business? Contact Digital Authority Partners to learn how we can help.