Local SEO is the practice of promoting all online aspects of a local business to improve its local and organic search engine visibility and multiple performance metrics. These metrics vary, based on unique business goals, but common ones for most local businesses include rankings, traffic, engagement, conversions, sales, reputation, Net Promoter Score, and more.
Local businesses engage in a variety of promotional practices, such as content publication and marketing, local business listing development and management, link and citation development, and reputation management in order to become competitive in the geographic markets they serve. The success of each marketing effort can only be fully evaluated when it can be tracked.
For example, if your local business launches a new review acquisition campaign, you would want to measure return on investment (ROI) by tracking whether the time spent actively requesting reviews from customers is yielding an increase in reviews received vs. a previous date range in which your business wasn’t asking for this valuable form of content. You could also measure additional outcomes, such as whether an improved review count is positively impacting your listings’ visibility in Google local packs, finders, and Maps.
The more competitive your local markets, the more necessary your investment in local SEO is likely to become. A strong local SEO effort is important because of its direct impacts on how consumers discover and choose your business for transactions.
It’s essential to note that local SEO and local search marketing campaigns continuously evolve to serve emerging trends in online consumer behavior. For example, when large-scale surveys like this one from GatherUp find that more than half of consumers are looking for local business recommendations on social media platforms instead of only looking at traditional sources like Google’s local packs, it’s an indicator that your business needs to develop a strong presence across a variety of social communities.
Another example would be how the 2024 Google API leak brought new local SEO industry focus to the topic of the impact of user behavior signals on rank. This might influence your business to devote more effort to optimizing your Google Business Profiles so that they are earning a higher rate of engagement.
While not every outcome of every local SEO task can be tracked, it’s ideal to track whichever metrics you can to get the fullest possible picture of returns on your investments.
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