Local small to midsize businesses are like favourite songs; they go on, at times even when you don’t think they will. Depending on the size of the businesses, the owners might regularly perform junior level work like building their own websites, managing budgets and contracting with SEO marketing firms to gain access to SEO marketing packages that are right for their firms.
Even if owners of small and midsize businesses hire marketing firms that specialize in SEO, it’s a good idea if they know how to take advantage of local and organic SEO techniques. But, first they need to understand the difference between the two.
“Local SEO has a geographical component which organic SEO does not necessarily have. It is the practice of building signals of relevance around a specific location; a brick-and-mortar business,” according to tapscape.com. Regarding organic SEO it is a, “marketing practice that revolves, more or less, around a website.”
Because Google, Bing and other search engines put emphasis on how businesses perform at local levels, good SEO marketing packages focus on local and online organic marketing, unless a company only has a brick-and-mortar store. In the case of the latter situation, local SEO marketing would be used.
Even then good SEO marketing packages would offer some online exposure. For example, marketing firms might build descriptive social media profiles for their clients. They also might develop quality content for their clients and publish the content on local websites, as well as at major social media networks, encouraging readers to share the content with their followers.
Another tactic SEO marketing specialists use is to build quality inbound links to their clients’ websites. If they do this right, the content will not only be shared with dozens or hundreds of other online users, the content will also generate lots of “likes”.
Search engines aren’t the only ones paying attention to the numbers of “likes” website content receives. Visitors to business websites, blogs and social media sites also take note of the numbers of “likes” the platforms receive.
To generate more visitor traffic, SEO marketing packages should also help business owners of small and midsize companies to build brand at local review sites and directories like Yelp, Manto, Yahoo! and Merchant Circle. Including the name of the business, address, website URL and telephone number creates a citation for the business.In the “eyes” of Google and friends, these citations increase the relevance and validity of your business within a specific city or region.” But, that’s not all.
“In the local algorithm, citations are not necessarily a “vote” for a particular business (like a link is with respect to organic SEO), but they do serve to validate that a business exists at a specific geographical location. This helps to make a business more relevant for particular searches which may relate to that business.”
It takes time to develop and maintain good organic and local SEO strategies. They are not one and the same, each requiring a different approach. What is similar about both of them is the goal that’s attached to them, that being the goal of increasing customer traffic and growing sales.
