When first investing money into SEO, you might not see any benefit for quite some time. Of course, with local SEO the competition for ranking keywords is often low, allowing for results to be seen much more quickly, but that’s not always the case. Over the course of weeks, or months, however, the investment will really begin to pay off. As Google and the other search engines begin to rank specific keywords, traffic will slowly begin to come in. The more keywords which are ranked, the more traffic will come in. Properly performed SEO will allow specific keywords and phrases to hold the top positions in the search engine results pages indefinitely, without any additional work, in many cases.
Local SEO for Long Term Results
One of the most significant benefits of using local SEO techniques is that there isn’t nearly the competition. If, for example, you’re operating a local pet store in your community, you don’t need to compete against every pet store in every city in the world. You simply need to compete with the other local pet stores, which is much less difficult. Local SEO will allow you to rank much more quickly, and hold on to those rankings with far less work than competing nationally or even globally.
When a SEO expert takes the time to perform the right on page and off-page SEO, your site will begin to rank in the search results quite quickly. With local SEO strategies you might only get a handful of visitors per day, but they will all be extremely well targeted, and very likely to make a purchase. Of course, depending on the nature of your business, you might get dramatically more visitors than that as a result of the SEO efforts.
Continuously Improving Results
Another great thing about using high-quality local SEO strategies is that the results will continue to improve over time. Your site may rank well for one keyword today, but as people continue to use your site and Google or the other search engines gather more data, you may begin to rank for other keywords as well. This will, naturally, bring in additional traffic. Over time, the search engines are constantly updating their algorithms and adjusting which sites are positioned for which keywords. With high-quality SEO, your site could keep ranking for additional keywords and phrases over time.
Of course, if the SEO performed doesn’t comply with the requirements of the search engines, you won’t get these types of benefits. This is why it is so important to either take the time to learn exactly how to best perform local SEO, or hire an expert to take care of it for you.