2023 E-commerce Local SEO: Top Methods for Enhancing Your Digital Visibility

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In recent years, e-commerce has secured a supreme spot in the bustling digital landscape. Online shopping seems like a boon to customers as well as businesses. In the vast digital ocean, visibility is vital for the survival and success of a business. To stand out from the crowd, you need to harness the power of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It will help you unlock doors to new horizons in the world of e-commerce.

SEO (comprises a set of practices intended to increase digital visibility by priming the website to align with search engine algorithms and rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO is crucial for increasing brand visibility, improving sales, boosting business growth, and enhancing its overall performance.

Understanding Local SEO

In simple words, local SEO is a strategy to increase the visibility of a business in the local search results. If your business serves a particular geographical area, then it can benefit from local SEO. 

Quite often, people seek local results (results from their immediate area) when looking up a specific type of product or business on a search engine. For this reason, the algorithm of a search engine (such as Google) includes a proximity factor. The results will vary depending on the location of the user. 

Local search facility has been available for years, but it was used only on desktops. These days people mostly turn to their mobile phones when they need to search for something. Looking up a business is now quick and easy, and can be done anywhere. This has also increased the importance of local search (and by extension local SEO) in recent years. Due to local SEO, local residents will be able to search and reach out to your business when they need. 

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With local SEO for mobile phones, you can put information about your business right into the hands of your target audience/potential customers. It’s like ensuring that they have your business card in their pockets when they need your product or service. 

Why Local SEO Matters for E-commerce

Local SEO can increase the visibility of your e-commerce business. It will give your e-commerce website to appear in the local map pack as well as the main organic search results.

Search for local businesses accounts for 46% of the total searches on Google. When people look for local businesses, they typically use the term ‘near me’. In the past few years, searches with the phrase ‘near me’ have increased by more than 500%. You can leverage the rise in the ‘near me’ searches with local SEO. 

A strong online presence is no longer an option for businesses. Online presence is especially important for e-commerce businesses because of their digital nature. With the best local SEO practices, you can ensure that your business stays relevant. 

Methods to Increase Digital Visibility

Optimize the digital footprint of your site to increase its potential and improve the chances of potential customers finding your business. Here are a few ways to use local SEO to increase the digital visibility of your website:

1. Google Business Profile Optimization
   
   

A great way to start with local SEO is to set up your Google Business Profile. It is free, and it will list important information about your business. You can provide details such as the address of your business, phone number, hours of operation, and website URL. Eventually, this information can show up in the local results on Google, and potential customers will be able to know where, when, and how they can reach your business. If your business has branch offices in multiple locations, you should create a separate Google Business Profile for each of them. 

2. Content Marketing for Local SEO

Optimize and create engaging local-audience targeted content. With such content, your business should be able to increase the depth of the connection with the audience. Focus on ideas that are more likely to resonate with the target audience but are also related and relevant to your business. With the help of a keyword research tool, find relevant keywords and phrases that local people are more likely to use for search purposes. 

Blogging and Resource Pages: Google’s new algorithms are giving key importance to a website’s content. This means that Google will now prioritize good content over everything else. By adding valuable articles for the audience, your e-commerce website will thrive and keep its customers wanting to return as well as build a fanbase. Additionally, you can create resource pages with links and descriptions of tools/websites/products/services that can prove beneficial to the local people. This will increase the chances of the audience returning to your website and posting about it on social media.  

3. Local Link Building

Inbound backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites are like votes of confidence for your website. Good quality links tell search engines that your site is reliable and valuable. Try to get links from local directory-type sites. Additionally, you should work towards acquiring links from other websites that focus on your location (such as local magazines and podcasts). Also, do not miss out on the benefits of internal links. Links within your site can also aid local SEO. A good internal linking structure will allow link equity and authority to flow through the site, which is good SEO practice.

4. Optimize Your URL Structure

Optimization of URLs for local SEO involves the usage of location-based keywords and making them user-friendly. Incorporate target location in the URL for pages specific to a region or city, to make it clear to users and search engines that the content is tailored for that region or city. Use hyphens rather than underscores or special characters in the URL as this makes it simple for search engines to distinguish and understand words. Avoid cluttering your URLs with unnecessary parameters or session IDs. Ensure a smooth user experience and maintain the value of existing backlinks by redirecting old URLs to new ones properly whenever necessary. 

5. Mobile Optimization

Ensure that your e-commerce site adapts and displays well across all devices, especially on mobile phones. Around 50 percent of smartphone users will access the mobile site of an e-commerce business because they do not want to download additional apps. Make sure your e-commerce business is not missing out on the advantages offered by the combination of mobile sites and local SEO.

6. Manage Reputation and Reviews

To build trust and credibility for your e-commerce website, encourage your customers to leave reviews. Provide exceptional customer service, and make review requests either in person, through email, or in invoices and receipts. Make the review process easy by providing direct links. The easier it is to leave a review, the more likely it is that a customer will add a review. Responding to reviews shows that customer feedback is valuable to you. If you want to incentivize reviews, proceed with extra caution to avoid any kind of penalties. Never put the reputation of your business at risk with fabricated reviews.

7. Harness the Power of a Strong Social Media Presence

Select social media platforms that are most relevant in your location, with your target audience, and with your industry. Ensure consistency of brand identity across all social media profiles. Regularly create and post high-quality engaging content to attract the local audience. Social media also allows you to build trust by interacting and engaging with your audience. For your social media posts, you should use geotags, local references, and relevant hashtags. You can gain more credibility among the local audience and expand your reach by collaborating with local influencers. Encourage your customers to share user-generated content (UGC) through contests, incentives, or genuine requests. Track the performance and engagement of your posts with social media analytics tools.

Technical Local SEO for E-commerce 

Site Speed and Performance

The fast loading speed of the website and pages is likely to reduce the bounce rate. Enhance the speed of your pages by compressing images, minifying images, and selecting a reliable hosting provider. The site speed and performance impact the user experience. Your e-commerce business will also benefit if your website has a clear and consistent navigation structure and a user-friendly layout. 

Schema Markup

With schema markup, you can ensure that Google and other search engines find and understand the important details of your business on your website. You can either install/add the local SEO schema markup by yourself using an online tool, or you can outsource the task to your web developer. When you mark your data with schema, you improve the chances of your website acquiring more SERP real estate, and by extension, higher click-through rates, increased traffic, and better rankings. 

XML Sitemaps and Site Structure

An XML sitemap will ensure that Google can find and crawl all the most important pages of your website as well as understand your site structure. Geo sitemap is especially useful in the case of local SEO, as it provides search engines information about the location of your business and content relevant to local searches. Geo sitemap can improve the indexing of your content and the chances of your website appearing for location-based queries.

Local SEO Checklist is a free resource where you can get additional information and advice regarding the best SEO practices for increasing local awareness and traffic to your site. 

Conclusion

Search engine’s algorithms are constantly changing. To have a solid digital presence brands must keep up with the ever-changing nature of SEO, keep their website and content up to date, and have an e-commerce SEO expert implement the latest trends in their campaigns. Use different aspects and strategies of local SEO in conjunction with each other to optimize your e-commerce website for enhanced visibility.