If you own or manage a local health food store and want to increase the number of customers who discover you while searching on Google, then SEO should be at the top of your priorities. As the SEO specialist at Perth-based SEO agency seoperthexperts.com.au points out, the opportunities for smaller and local businesses to get to the top of the search results have never been greater.
The first point we must make here is with regards to many small and local business owners believing that they cannot compete with larger businesses for the top positions on Google. This is not the case, and in fact, for certain keywords local businesses often have a huge advantage when it comes to competing for the top positions on Google.
Obviously, larger health food companies have larger marketing budgets, but when it comes to assessing rankings, Google’s algorithm has barely any idea whether a multi-national company or a single local store owns a website. This means that your local health store’s website has as much chance of hitting the top positions as a large company, if your SEO strategy is set up and carried out correctly.
One of the reasons your health food store’s website can compete is that Google has a huge emphasis on local searches, and it has set up its algorithm to take account of geographical searches. What that means is, if someone is simply searching for ‘health food’ it is a general search and therefore Google is likely to have larger, generic websites in the results for this.
However, if a search like ‘health food store in Subiaco’ is entered, the search results will look very different. Google knows that the person is looking for a local health food store and in particular one located in the City of Subiaco. As such, any health food store which has its website and its SEO set up and optimised to indicate it is located in Subiaco, has an excellent chance of ranking highly.
This stems from Google’s determination to make all its search results match as closely as possible to what the people searching are looking for. It tries to almost read their minds and therefore if someone searching enters a location along with the search terms, Google’s algorithm assumes they are looking for a local solution rather than a generic one.
What you will find is that the large companies who might not have local stores, but instead rely on e-commerce for their sales, tend to use their SEO to rank for brand names or names of specific types of products. They, therefore, do not really care whether someone searching is in Subiaco or San Francisco, and as such do not optimise for these or any other locations. This leaves the field open for local businesses, including your health food store, to step in and rank for local searches.
You might be thinking ‘That sounds great, but won’t there be far fewer local searches than generic ones?’, and the answer to that is obviously ‘Yes’. The point is that whilst you are competing in a much smaller field you are likely to receive a much larger proportion of that traffic if you optimise for local searches. Also, your local health store is exactly what anyone searching for local solution wants and thus they are more likely to follow up with a purchase.