Is Local SEO Dead?

Since Googles the so-called Pigeon update in 2013, everyone shared their thoughts about local SEO. It was very controversial, and many people thought it would die out relatively soon. However, moving forward to 2021, almost half of all Google searches fit into the local SEO category. Therefore, anyone saying or believing that local SEO is dead is just wrong. Local SEO is thriving, and it’s a unique opportunity to start increasing your local customer base.

To give you a better understanding of what this means, it’s suggesting that almost half of Google’s searches include a geographical-specific keyword. These can include a state, city, town, village, or have phrases like “near me”, “where to buy”, etc.

If you’d like to understand more about why local SEO isn’t dead, I suggest you become familiar and read further.

Why local SEO isn’t dead

To back our reasoning further, we thought this topic needed to be discussed further. Some of the statistics that local SEO provides are remarkable and something you’ll want to become knowledgeable on. This way, you can understand why it’s sensible to implement local SEO into your marketing strategy if it’s right for your business model.

1. Yearly increases on local search

Year after year, the amount people are using local search terms is increasing. To gain a better visualization of this, see the below table:

Source: Google (the above information is regarding mobile search queries only)

As you can see, Google has clearly displayed how local search terms are still prominent within today’s SEO world. Therefore, optimizing your content for local has never been more important.

2. High visiting rates

Local searches are essential, but they’re nothing if people aren’t visiting the businesses’ location. However, it’s estimated that around 1.5 billion people that search for location-related queries visit the location each month. Failing to plan a local SEO strategy could result in you missing out on many potential laser-targeted customers. While they visit, you could create a reoccurring customer out of them, upsell goods or services, and build a much better relationship.

3. High conversion rates  

Out of the 1.5 billion people who intend to visit the search location, around 78% will make an offline purchase. This figure and the above, should be enough to determine that local SEO isn’t dead. If you build well-optimized and engaging web pages which entice them to visit, you can expect around 3 out of 4 of them to purchase something. Receiving conversion rates of this level with any marketing technique is hardly known, backing our discussion even further.

As you can see, there are various reasons why local SEO isn’t dead. Of course, businesses that have an offline location can benefit more from this than businesses that don’t. If you only sell goods or services online, it’s challenging to start obtaining immense returns on this type of marketing. But you can still get a lot more traffic to your website of webshop by focussing on local SEO.

Conclusion: making local SEO easier

Local SEO is a great way to start generating more sales offline. However, the best way to promote this is by creating content targeting locations. To make this process much easier, you’ll want to become familiar with our WordPress plugin SEO Generator. With this, you can make unlimited local optimized web pages by just creating one template. For instance, you can create a local template and automatically receive local pages for New York, London, Paris, and Amsterdam, etc, all in one click.

If you want to increase your local SEO performance, consider checking out our WordPress plugin here.