Local SEO has become critical to businesses in the last few years. With 46% of all Google searches in 2019 seeking local information (Birkett, 2020), you could be losing thousands of potential customers who are ready to make a purchase in your area if you are not optimizing your business for local search. Fortunately, digital marketers believe that there are many reliable tools now like SEO software that can help in SEO optimization activities.

In this article, we’ve compiled the newest local SEO statistics that can serve as your guide when formulating your own local SEO strategy. Whether you’re a business owner handling your own SEO or you’re a marketing professional, you’ll surely find these data points insightful as we cover the current state of local SEO, what strategies are gaining traction over the past year, and what challenges lie ahead for both businesses and marketers in implementing local SEO.

1. The Current State of Local SEO

Most marketers agree that when it comes to local SEO, Google rules. Not only do customers turn to Google for their local searches; consumers also make purchase decisions based on Google reviews and rankings. In fact, more than 50% of consumers won’t use a business that has less than a 4-star rating.

• Local queries account for almost half of Google’s two trillion searches per year (MOZ, 2020).
• How important is local SEO to businesses? Thirty-five percent of marketers strongly agree and 42% agree that Google is becoming the new homepage for local businesses (MOZ, 2020).
• 79% of companies are paying Google for online advertising (MOZ, 2020).
• More than 50% of consumers won’t use a business if it has less than a four-star rating (Birkett, 2020).
• 64% of consumers use Google My Business (GMB) to find business addresses or phone numbers (Murphy, 2020).
• Proximity ranks 3rd place among Google local ranking factors. From a scale of 1 (most important) to 10 (least important): consistency of citations (5.6), physical address in the city of search (6.1), the proximity of searcher to the place of business (6.4), Google Reviews (6.5), and Google My Business (7.4) (MOZ, 2020).
• 88% of marketers agree that there’s a close correlation between local and organic ranking (MOZ, 2020).
• 42% of companies have adopted an automated approach to listing management (MOZ, 2020).
• Local link building (18%), local content development (15%), and on-site optimization (13%) are the top 3 activities marketers want more resources for (MOZ, 2020).
• For enterprise marketers, the one activity that they would like more resources devoted to is review management (13.9%). This is followed by local content development (13.2%), on-site optimization 13.2%), local link building (11.1%), technical analysis of ranking/traffic/conversions (10.4%), and website design (9%) (MOZ, 2020).
• 50% of marketers believe that SEO tools are keeping up with the changes in local marketing (MOZ, 2020).
• The majority of marketers (67.7%) use two to five SEO tools to do their work, with about 12% using more than six tools/software products (MOZ, 2020).

Who’s responsible for local SEO?

SEO is a crucial part of digital marketing in today’s Internet-connected world. That’s why the task of optimization and audits cannot rest on just one person. In fact, nowadays, there is a specialist for everything, including content SEO, ecommerce SEO, and local SEO.

This is why it’s not surprising that studies report SEO to be a team effort managed by everyone from the small business owner to the many marketing professionals with different job titles doing their own on local SEO.

• Local SEO is handled by different departments and people depending on the company size. Seventy-five percent of large companies with multiple locations relied on their marketing department, while smaller businesses do the work 36% of the time (MOZ, 2020).
• At agencies, responsibilities for local SEO lay with either the marketing department (40%), account management (15%), or a dedicated SEO department (18%) (MOZ, 2020).
• The most common services offered by local marketers: GMB optimization (93%), SEO audits/analysis (88%), on-site optimization (84%), reporting/analytics (82%), citation management (78%), website design (76%), content creation/optimization (74%) (Murphy, 2020).
• 91% of large, multi-location businesses have a full-time SEO resource (MOZ, 2020).
• 77% of respondents shared that they have one or more SEOs on staff—up 8% from last year (MOZ, 2020).
• 40% of SMBs outsource some or all of their local SEO work (MOZ, 2020).
• Employees in local marketing agencies work on an average of 17 clients, while a typical freelancer has eight (Murphy, 2020).

2. Statistics on Local SEO Strategies

It seems like local SEO marketers have shifted their strategy from a rankings-first approach to a conversion and revenue one. This signals that businesses want more actual sales and conversion from customers than just rankings on SERPs.

On the other hand, the top priorities for local SEO have remained the same as in previous years. These include on-site optimization, website design, and technical analysis of ranking/traffic/conversions. Current statistics on SEO also show the importance of optimizing for Google Maps. Aside from being the default map for Android users, many consumers also use it as a navigation tool for their community.

It’s also interesting to see which SEO activities marketing experts have focused more of their efforts on in 2020 and which ones have taken a back seat in their local SEO campaign. Spam fighting is the top priority of marketers, while the consistency of citations on other citation sources is the least of their concerns.

• Local SEO has shifted from a rankings-first approach to a conversion and revenue one with 66% of marketers reporting this as their marketing goal. (MOZ, 2020).
• The top three strategic priorities for local SEO campaigns have remained the same as in past years: on-site optimization (19.9%), website design (11.8%), and technical analysis of ranking/traffic/conversions (11.7%) (MOZ, 2020).
• Ranking factors marketing experts focused on more in the past year: Removal of spam listings through spam-fighting (265 points), quality/authority of inbound links to domain (243 points), completeness of GMB listing (166 points), quantity of native Google reviews (154 points), primary GMB Category (126 points) (Whitespark, 2020).
• Ranking factors marketing experts focused on less in the past year: Consistency of citations on other citation sources (372 points), the quantity of structured citations (316 points), enhancement/completeness of citations (241 points), BBB accredited (224 points), and the consistency of citations on data aggregators (211 points) (Whitespark, 2020).
• 91% of marketers have a SERPs feature strategy in place. The top three include featured snippets (25.6%), local packs (24.7%), and Google Business profile (23.9%) (MOZ, 2020).
• Local link building is still a popular strategy. 71% of marketers have a local link-building strategy in place (MOZ, 2020).
• Organic SERPs rule engagement (54%), but marketers list mediums other than organic search as sources of engagement for their companies. These include local finders (26%) and Google Maps (18%) (MOZ, 2020).
• Up to 86% look up the physical location of a business on Google Maps (Ahern, 2021).
• For measuring ROI, local marketers rely on Google products to track, analyze, and report on their work. These include Google Analytics (89.3%), Google Search Console (80.4%), and Google My Business (73.9%) (MOZ, 2020).

3. Local SEO Benefits Statistics

There are numerous factors that can dictate the success of an SEO campaign. So, there’s no doubt that you will have to put in the hours if you want your local SEO efforts to yield conversions. In case you think it’s not worth your time, these statistics showing what you could be missing out on might convince you otherwise.

• 40% of SEO campaigns tracking ROI achieved a 500% or better ROI compared to just 22% of PPC campaigns (Birkett, 2020).
• Over 50% of ‘near me’ searches result in a physical store visit (Sullivan, 2018).
• 97% of people learn more about a local company online than anywhere else (Birkett, 2020).
• The results listed in the top three Google search results account for more than 75% of all clicks (Dean, 2019).
• 72% of consumers that did a local search visited a store within five miles of their location (Birkett, 2020).
• All things being equal, moving up a single position in Google search results increases relative CTR by 30.8% (Dean, 2019).

Don’t forget to include reviews in your local SEO as well. Doing so can help you gain trust from customers and impact local rankings.

• 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations (Birkett, 2020).
• 90% of marketers believe reviews impact local rankings (MOZ, 2020).
• 88% of searches for local businesses on a mobile device either call or visit the business within 24 hours (Birkett, 2020).
• 78% of location-based mobile searches result in an offline purchase (Birkett, 2020).

Local SEO is also important if you’re company is targeting B2B clients.

• Based on B2B SEO statistics, 71% of B2B researchers begin their research with generic Google searches (Dziak, 2021).
• 57% of B2B marketers say that SEO generates more leads than any of their other marketing initiatives in 2020 (Dziak, 2021).

4. Data on Local SEO Best Practices

In 2020, one of the biggest trends in local SEO is optimizing for Google My Business (GMB). Aside from having a positive impact on your ranking on Google’s local pack, conversions from GMB also ranked the highest as reported and ranked by marketing experts.

• 75% of marketers believe that the use of Google My Business profile features impacts rankings in the local pack (MOZ, 2020).
• Local search ranking factors in 2020 showed Google My Business (GMB) signals taking the largest slice of the pie with 33%. Reviews followed with 16%, on-page (15%), links (15%), behavioral (8%), citations (7%), personalization (6%) (Whitespark, 2020).
• When analyzing conversion factors within GMB, Google ratings turned out to be the highest-ranking factor (465 points), positive sentiment in review text (330 points), quantity of native Goggle reviews (264 points), proximity of address to the point of search (217 points), GMB messaging feature is enabled (202 points) (Whitespark, 2020).

In addition to the abovementioned, you might want to consider applying best practices to metadata such as the title and description of your web pages. With these, you can improve clickthrough rates and improve the traffic on your site. You can also check out our guide to hyperlocal marketing for more ideas.

• Title tags between 15 to 40 characters have the best CTR (35%) (Dean, 2019). Power Words actually decreased CTR by 13.9% (Dean, 2019).
• Experts predict that voice search will also grow rapidly in the coming years with 21% of consumers using voice search on a weekly basis (Collins, 2019).
• Emotional titles have a 7.3% higher absolute CTR compared to non-emotional titles (Dean, 2019).
• Pages with meta descriptions had a 5.8% better CTR compared to pages without a description (Dean, 2019).
• Titles with questions had a 14.1% higher click-through rate compared to titles without a question (Dean, 2019).

5. Local SEO Challenges Statistics

SEO is a highly in-demand service, that’s why marketers have a hard time saying no to the work involved in SEO. But even though it’s a crucial part of marketing, SEO is not immune to the negative impacts of COVID-19. Most marketing departments are now facing budget cuts as evidenced by survey results.

Additionally, local SEO marketers feel their companies are not yet with Google’s shift to mobile-first indexing for all websites.

• 70% of marketers said their budgets have been cut due to COVID-19 (MOZ, 2020).
• Local SEO campaigns suffered a 23% cutback because of the pandemic (MOZ, 2020).
• Among agency marketers, 83% said their budget has been cut due to the COVID-19 pandemic, while 63% of non-agency marketers said the same (MOZ, 2020).
• 33% of companies are not prepared for mobile-first indexing (MOZ, 2020).
• 61% of local marketers find it difficult to turn work down (Murphy, 2020).

Improve Business Reach With Local SEO

If there’s one thing that’s clear from these local SEO statistics, it’s that optimizing local reach matters a lot to businesses. Customers are undeniably going online to search for products and services that they can find within their community. After all, no one wants to travel far just to browse products they’re interested in. Moreover, not a lot of consumers are willing to pay hefty shipping fees or wait a long time before getting their hands on their purchase. As such, if you haven’t had a chance to build a local SEO strategy, it’s high time that you start.

As we also saw, the majority of marketers agree that Google My Business is something companies should really focus on. By incorporating this into your strategies, you can boost the visibility of your brand and potentially reach your target audience more efficiently. But of course, as with any campaign, it is important not to rely solely on GMB to rank and convert. There are plenty of other best practices that you can apply in order to reinforce your SEO efforts.

For starters, we recommend always staying updated on SEO trends like voice search and strategies similar to the points we mentioned earlier. Finally, it is important to keep in mind that quality, useful content is still the best SEO strategy—one that can ultimately lift your rankings and conversions from organic search.

References:

1. MOZ (2020). State of Local SEO Industry Report 2020. Retrieved from MOZ
2. Birkett (2020). Local SEO in 2020. Retrieved from Blue Square Management
3. Whitespark (2020). 2020 Local Search Ranking Factors. Retrieved from Whitespark
4. Dean (2019). Here’s What We Learned About Organic Click Through Rate. Retrieved from Backlinko
5. Murphy (2020). Local Search Industry Survey. Retrieved from Bright Local
6. Collins (2019). Study: How ready are businesses for voice search? Retrieved from Search Engine Watch
7. Ahern (2021). 27 Mind-Bottling SEO Stats for 2021 (+ Beyond). Retrieved from Intergrowth
8. Sullivan (2018). ‘Near Me’ Searches Don’t Need Keywords To Find Local Goods, Services. Retrieved from Mediapost

By Jenny Chang

Jenny Chang is a senior writer specializing in SaaS and B2B software solutions. Her decision to focus on these two industries was spurred by their explosive growth in the last decade, much of it she attributes to the emergence of disruptive technologies and the quick adoption by businesses that were quick to recognize their values to their organizations. She has covered all the major developments in SaaS and B2B software solutions, from the introduction of massive ERPs to small business platforms to help startups on their way to success.