Local SEO Myths

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September 12, 2012 by Steve

This is my first post of a brand new blog, what I am going to look at today is a few local SEO myths that seem to float around and get picked up on by small businesses.

The first myth that I want to deal with is that Local SEO will yield instant results. Local SEO, just like standard SEO, is not something that is going to turn things around for you overnight, it takes time before you begin seeing the fruits of your labour. It takes time to build links, it takes time to get your business registered on the various local directories (including Google+, you have registered with them right?) and it then takes time for those links to get indexed by the search engines.

The second myth that I have heard repeatedly is that you should forget SEO and concentrate your efforts on Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing. There are quite a few reasons why you should not neglect a local SEO campaign in favour of a PPC campaign, by all means run them together if you have the budget. Statistics show that the majority of searchers bypass the ad’s and go straight to the organic listings and particularly to the map listings if the it is a localised query. The best tactic for you to employ is to use a wide variety of marketing techniques together to get the most effective campaign. This would include local SEO, social media marketing, traditional SEO and Pay Per Click.

The final myth that I would like to address with this, very brief, first post is that getting citations to your site alone will achieve high rankings. Now I guess I should state that this may actually be true if you are in a completely un-competitive niche but anywhere else and you are going to need to do more. You are going to need backlinks to your website, a well optimised website with plenty of local content, some good user reviews on Google+ and other sites etc etc.