5 Reasons why your business needs a local SEO agency

Businesses hire SEO agencies to boost their search results ranking worldwide. The internet has made it easier for businesses to operate from different parts of the world. While we've heard of SEO being optimized for a visibility to a broader audience, there are reasons why local SEO is more important.

Local SEO focuses on the discoverability and visibility of a business within a geographical area. Let's take an example of how local SEO can be targeted precisely for a particular area: you're in Toronto, and you want to try the best Chinese restaurants in the city. You'll be searching Google for "Chinese restaurants in Toronto" instead of "Chinese restaurants".

Local SEO contributes significantly to increasing trust and brand awareness because your customers are in close proximity to you. Examples of businesses that need local SEO a lot more than global SEO are restaurants, auto dealers, local consultants, law offices, hair salons, local non-profit organizations, photographers, manufacturers, grocery stores, and museums.

Here are some of the most important reasons why you should hire a local SEO agency

1. They know the geographical area

Knowing the dynamics of a specific area is important for local SEO. Local SEO agencies consist of people who belong to the same area. They have a better understanding of the people, their likes, customs, traditions, and habits. Local SEO is particularly useful for newer businesses in the area. The SEO plan your agency will develop can even cash on local news and trending stories.

All of these considerations have to go into their SEO strategy. As a result, knowledge of these factors beforehand would give their SEO a head start.

2. They know the local keywords better

Local strategies opt for a more location-specific customized approach. There are some similarities between global SEO and local SEO techniques, but local SEO can be a little tricky to master.

Using the knowledge of people and the specific words they use is critical. If you want your business to rank higher, you would want your search to be targeted around those words.

There are some terms that are specific to some areas. Some countries prefer the word "restos" for restaurants and some brands have different names for different countries (e.g. Burger King is called Hungry Jack's in Australia). The people will be searching according to their local lingo. If you hire an SEO agency from a different geographical area, they may not be aware of these local keywords.

3. Quality vs Quantity

When focusing on global SEO, keyword-oriented searches can result in a huge promotion. Getting an endorsement or traction from an industry leader can be a massive boost for you. However, at local level, quantity needs to be prioritized over quality in many cases.

While you can benefit from significant players, getting many small companies to link-support you can make a bigger impact. This may also lead to local social media shares that, in turn, help local businesses significantly too.

4. Local visibility

People can easily find you on Google maps if they are within your geographic area. If you can manage to get several reviews on your social media or Google, local SEO will have already eased out for you. This would require you to ask your existing customers to leave a review when they're satisfied.

Local SEO experts can capitalize on such practices, and visibility can be achieved more quickly and easily. If you have a marketing plan incorporating a mixture of inorganic and organic SEO strategies, ads targeting a local market cost much cheaper.

In addition to local SEO agencies taking a shorter time for organic results, inorganic local SEO results will probably be fast.

5. Higher Domain authority

Moz, an SEO and marketing tool expert, came up with a metric they called Domain authority (DA). On a scale of 0 to 100, it calculates how likely it is to rank on the search engine results.

DA is driven by links, and the more links a website has, the higher the DA. Developing DA is easier locally than internationally. For example, an article from the New York Times is far more likely to rank higher compared to the case if the same article was posted on some other site with a lower reader base. This is because New York Times's DA is higher.

So you can create valuable quality content that other web users will have a higher chance to link. You can create a higher authority this way.