You have a local business. You have a modern, sleek and responsive website. You are spending effort creating social media strategy and executing on it.
Meanwhile, I am a resident in your town and need the service that your business offers.
I went to Google and searched for the service in my zip code and could not find your business on the first page rather found your competition with good reviews and end up going with them.
You definitely do not want that your potential customers did not even consider your services for their needs. That's a lost opportunity.
In this blog post, we are going to look at the latest Google search results data available and analyze if it's worth the effort and money to be one of the top search results for your business. Here are the top 5 reasons. You be the judge.....
1. 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information. (Source: GoGulf)
97% of the people learn more about a local company online than anywhere else.
This is an astonishing local search statistics and if it does not make business owners have a strategy to spend time and effort for improving their local SEO is poised for a bumpy ride in the future.
2. 72% of consumers who did a local search visited a store within five miles (Source: Impactplus)
This is a great data point for optimizing local SEO for businesses against their competition.
For example, if I run a local massage therapy business and I know the above data point, I know where to focus my energy to attract my customers.
I will focus effort to bring awareness of my business within a 5-10 mile radius of my business location for my future customers.
I will also focus on learning more about my competition within the same parameter and optimize my products/services to stand out.
3. 75% of users never scroll past the first page of the search results (Source - HubSpot)
Yes, you have heard that right - 3/4 of the people will not go beyond the first page of the google search results.
Google lists ~10 organic and around ~7-8 ad search results per page.
Next time you search in google for something, check how many times you go to page two or beyond of the search results.
One of the key reasons people don't have to do that is for the reason that Google's algorithms have become increasingly smart and sophisticated to present with more relevant and authoritative content.
Google does that to make sure people get what they are looking for in the shortest period of time and that information is relevant to what they are looking for.
4. First five organic results account for 67.60% of all the clicks (Source: Zero Limit Web)
You thought the previous reason was eye-opening, now it gets more interesting when 2/3 of the people looking for local businesses will not go beyond the first 5 organic results.
Usually, each search result page has ~10 results against the keyword search.
If my business is not showing up on the top 5 results, I am losing 1/3 of my potential customers.
5. The average click-through rate (CTR) for the first position on a Google search query is 19.30% and the click-through rate for the second position is almost half at 10.57%. (Source: Internet Marketing Ninjas)
To make it more challenging, there is almost ~50% drop in click-through rate between the top organic search results and the 2nd one.
If you look closely, whoever is showing up as the top search result, the business's website is very well optimized for local SEO.
You must be wondering - starting a business and running is tough enough and now looks like you will never get foot traffic from your website unless you are the top search result for your business.
There is no need to panic. There are tools and techniques things you can do today to build your rank up on Google.
Check out our post on 5 actionable tips to improve your Local-SEO rankings.
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