When people are asked to think about SEO, they’ll often associate the term with online businesses – companies whose sole aim is to drive potential customers to their website. In reality, SEO has many more ‘real world’ applications. When specialist SEO tactics are used to increase your local exposure, it’s referred to as ‘local SEO’.

A staggering number of people use search engines to find local businesses. In fact, 46% of all Google searches are local. Around 50% of those people are looking for contact details, opening hours, addresses or other business-specific information.

With such significant numbers of people searching for local businesses, it’s no surprise to discover nearly 80% of local mobile searches result in an offline purchase.

Local SEO is powerful – and if you do business locally, it should be a marketing priority. While the basics of local SEO are easy to grasp, putting them into action requires answers to some complex questions, including:

• How can you be sure you’re represented in the places local people are searching?
• What kind of site content do search engines look for when ranking local businesses?
• How can you combine local SEO, blogger outreach and link building to maximum effect?

Summon have supported many local companies to drive business with a number of local SEO fundamentals. Whether you’re looking to attract local business  – or if you’d like to capture some of that local appeal for your bigger company, we can help.

The statistics may show large numbers of people are using search engines to find local businesses – but what does building some local SEO tactics into your overall marketing campaign actually offer?

At Summon, we believe there’s no universal ‘right way’ to make digital marketing work for you – and our local SEO services are no different. This is why we’ll start with an understanding of you, your business and your aims.

We will also perform a local SEO audit and some keyword research. This will look at your site, your business listings, social media profiles and much more, as well as making adjustments along the way.

When we’ve established what’s working well for you – and what the competition is doing, we’ll focus on your website – ensuring the important technical basics are in place. Doing so gives you a solid foundation that the rest of our local SEO work can be built upon.

With the essentials in place, we can help you to create content that identifies your site as being an authority in your industry. We’ll identify a number of opportunities that will help bolster your local SEO campaign. For example, link opportunities or citation site placements. We’ll monitor every step of the process, making sure you get the best return for your investment.