While the internet connects people worldwide, many local businesses are still very much dependent on local customers.

Attracting people in your area to your local business requires a technique called “Local SEO”. Basically, local SEO involves using specific geographically specific keywords to send traffic to your business website.

How to Use Local SEO on Your Website

Basically, local SEO works like this: If somebody goes online searching for a business like yours, they probably are going to use specific keywords.

For example, let’s say you own a dry cleaning business in Tampa. People looking for a local dry cleaning business who type in the keywords “dry cleaners” into their search engine probably would get results that include dry cleaning businesses all over the US, or even the world..

But if these same prospective customers type in the keywords “dry cleaners in Tampa”, they will get results that include only local dry cleaning businesses in Tampa, Florida.

Optimizing with Local SEO

How does that happen? Google, Bing, and the other big search engines scan and rank websites for specific keywords. When they find a web page for a local Tampa dry cleaners, they will include this in their rankings for those specific keywords.

But search engines will rank near the top of the search results those sites with the exact keywords “Tampa dry cleaners” in their headlines, subheads, first 100 words of the text, last 100 words of the text, photo descriptions, and other places.

That’s what local SEO means. By including geographically specific keywords in specific places in your web pages, you can get your web page ranked at or near the top of the list anybody gets when they type those keywords into the most popular search engines.

And given the fact that most people use their mobile devices to search for local businesses, local SEO is only going to become more important as time goes on.