Bots Job Easier SEO

Why Should I Care About Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Google 3 pack example

Without it, it would be more challenging to find your business online. Less than 10% of the local pack results would have landed on the first page of the search engine results page. 80% of any search volume goes to the first page results. 71% to the top 5. Without local SEO, you are unlikely to make the cut.

Local SEO helps to level the playing field somewhat so small businesses can have the opportunity to be visible when people are near their location and searching for products or services that are relevant to their business.

This is an example of the 3 pack for the search "Italian Restaurants Near Me"

Local SEO Is About Making a Bot’s Job Easier

Bots are programs that crawl the web to perform the basic tasks or ranking a page based on its relevance to a category. They are the professor who is about to grade your work.

The grade you will receive is based on three things. 

  1. Content: The bot will use its natural language processing tools to determine what it thinks is the key theme of the page.
  2. Clarity of Indexing: Next, based on the theme it has determined, it will index your page according to keywords it feels is most relevant to the theme. Hopefully, you have done a good job and its assessment matches yours.
  3. Reputation: To me, it is the clearest way to explain domain authority. The more people who cite your work (link), or the more times you’ve been quoted in other work, the more clout your business website will have. The higher your clout is the better your final grade will be.  

What does this mean for local SEO

For content, it means that you need to have relevant information focused on that particular location be it neighborhood, town, or city.

With indexing, there needs to be sufficient use of the location in your text, so the bot knows that you are writing for a particular local audience.

Finally, using the reputation metaphor, being known and trusted in your neighborhood is a lot easier than being known nationally. Therefore, you don’t need as high of a score to rank reasonably well.